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India’s apex pollution watchdog has finally come out with new norms to help authorities decide whether an industrial cluster is “critically polluted". Announcing the norms, the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) also ordered strict air and water quality monitoring. But in the process of updating the Comprehensive Environmental Pollution Index (CEPI), the board has done away with criteria such as the potential impact on the health of people as it felt that these cannot be measured objectively, are time consuming and cost too much. These factors figured in the previous CEPI, which was based on the effect of industrial clusters on air, water, land, health and ecology. They also served as a yardstick to assess progress in tackling pollution in such areas. Authorities have long sought to regulate environmental standards at industrial clusters, the definition of which varies from state to state. In 2009, CPCB, in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, carried out environmental assessments of 88 industrial clusters across India. Of the 88 clusters, 43 whose CEPI scores were 70 or higher were declared as critically polluted areas (CPAs) while 32 were described as seriously polluted areas (SPAs). (A higher score, on a scale of 0 to 100, indicates a greater degree of pollution.) In January 2010, during the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, the environment ministry imposed a moratorium on building any development projects in those areas. So far, the pollution control board has undertaken monitoring activity in the 43 critically polluted areas in 2009, 2011 and 2013. But in June 2014, the environment ministry under the newly elected National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government asked the board to “reassess" the index within a year. The pollution board claimed that several state governments, industrial associations and other entities had repeatedly requested the board to reassess the index. The order to reassess the index followed moves by both the UPA and NDA government to lift the moratorium from several critically polluted areas to facilitate industry. In September 2015, the board came out with a watered down version of the index, proposing to do away consideration of factors such as the impact on people and eco-geological features, citing the absence of reliable data (mintne.ws/1ISaqo7). With CEPI 2016—released in the last week of April—the index will be calculated on the basis of factors such as the scale of industrial activity, status of ambient environment (air, surface water and groundwater) quality, health related statistics (drawn from major hospitals of the area being studied) and compliance status of industries. Experts say doing away with the criteria of “potentially affected populations in a cluster" and replacing it with health data drawn from major hospitals will not give a complete picture. As part of the new norms, the central board has written to all State Pollution Control Boards (SPCBs) asking them to install continuous ambient air quality and real time water monitoring stations. States have also been asked to put the CEPI scores of critically polluted areas in the public domain and implement action plans—short-, medium- and long-term—that would restore the environmental quality of those industrial clusters and bring down their CEPI score. The action plan, the central board said, should be reviewed periodically to monitor the progress of implementation. The board also asked state governments to issue public advisories declaring that such critically polluted industrial clusters are only meant for industrial activity. It also said that the new norms can now be applied to locations other than industrial clusters in order to calculate pollution levels. The pollution watchdog has asked SPCBs to inform it about the action they have taken by the end of June. The new norms mean factors like potentially affected populations in a cluster and the assessment of health impact will not now be considered. The central board felt that measuring them objectively will need reliable health impact studies on humans, flora and fauna, which in turn will be expensive, time consuming and complex in the absence of representative data. Environmentalists warned the new norms are merely a dilution of the present environmental norms and designed to clear more industrial projects. They expressed concern that the new norms could affect millions of people living in and around industrial clusters. CPCB is under the environment ministry and is headed by one of its joint secretaries. “If CPCB is unable to assess the parameters it does not mean the impact doesn’t exist or affect people. It would be instead better for CPCB to collaborate with organizations who have the methodologies to assess such impacts. Otherwise what is the point of understanding and calculating pollution if you can’t relate it to the impact on both living and non-living beings?" said Kanchi Kohli, legal research director at the Namati Environmental Justice Programme of the Centre for Policy Research, a Delhi-based non-governmental organization working on a range of policies, including environmental issues.

Fish oil -- long encouraged by doctors as a supplement to support heart and joint health, among other benefits -- induced severe colitis and colon cancer in mice in research led by Michigan State University and published this month in the journal Cancer Research. Jenifer Fenton, a food science and human nutrition researcher at MSU, led the research that supports establishing a dose limit for docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), one of the omega-3 fatty acids present in fish oil, particularly in people suffering from chronic conditions such as inflammatory bowel diseases. "We found that mice developed deadly, late-stage colon cancer when given high doses of fish oil," she said. "More importantly, with the increased inflammation, it only took four weeks for the tumors to develop." Specifically, the research team found an increase in the severity of the cancer and an aggressive progression of the cancer in not only the mice receiving the highest doses of DHA but those receiving lower doses as well. The mice used in the study were prone to inflammatory-like bowel disease; inflammation is an important risk factor for many types of cancers, including colon cancer. "Our findings support a growing body of literature implicating harmful effects of high doses of fish oil consumption in relation to certain diseases," Fenton said. "Currently, there is a call by academics and the food industry to establish dietary guidelines for omega-3 consumption. This is primarily motivated by the fact that most Americans are deficient in omega-3 fatty acids, and there is substantial evidence supporting the beneficial effects of the consumption." The findings were surprising, specifically because DHA has been shown to have some anti-inflammatory properties, according to Fenton: "We hypothesized that feeding fish oil enriched with DHA to mice would decrease the cancer risk; we actually found the opposite. These mice were less equipped to mount a successful immune response to bacteria that increased colon tumors." Fenton cautions people may not need to avoid fish oil; what the research shows is needed are guidelines on dosing. With any nutrient, there is a "bell curve" effect. On the left of the curve are those deficient in a nutrient; on the right are those in excess. She said people already receiving enough omega-3 fatty acids through their normal diet and foods have no need for added supplementation. "With fish oil, we don't yet know how much is appropriate," said Fenton, also a researcher with the Michigan Agricultural Experiment Station. "There are many examples of taking supplements, nutrients or chemicals in excess that can promote cancer (for example, beta-carotene supplementation in smokers). Supplementation is most useful when the person taking them is deficient in that specific nutrient." The research team's findings could have an important preventive health impact, specifically in light of the high rates of colon cancer in the United States. Individuals with inflammatory bowel disease have an increased risk of developing colon cancer, and when the cancer metastasizes it can be fatal. The next step, Fenton said, is to test omega-3 fatty acid levels in people with inflammatory bowel disease. To that end, she is continuing to build relationships -- via MSU's College of Osteopathic Medicine campus in Macomb County -- with gastrointestinal specialists to develop a cohort of patients. "To help develop guidelines, we need to see how these findings correlate to human populations," she said.

Many Chinese students do not even know Liu Xiaobo's name. Credit:Joe Armao When asked their thoughts on any political matter, many will respond: "I don't discuss politics." Those who will talk often borrow the slogans and phrases of China's propaganda machine. Australia is home to 1 million citizens of Chinese descent – a number that includes me. What happens in China today matters more than ever, especially as China becomes more assertive around the globe, and as Chinese students flock to Australia's universities. I first stumbled onto this issue while reporting for the Australian National University's student newspaper. After reading an investigation by Fairfax Media journalist John Garnaut into Chinese spies at Sydney University, I reached out to the Chinese community around ANU, convinced the same must be happening in Canberra. What I found was a Chinese community of which the rest of the university was largely ignorant. In an economics lecture I struck up a conversation with a Chinese international student named Tom, who had studied in Beijing. To my surprise, Tom loved the dissident artist Ai Weiwei and underground music; we both listened to the same local Beijing bands. The Chinese Communist Party exploits the isolation of Chinese students to expand its influence beyond its borders. Credit:Louie Douvis A few minutes after meeting him, he turned to me and asked: "Don't you think it's a bit lonely here?" He had good English, but he didn't have many friends and no non-Chinese ones. Most Chinese international students I've met don't have any close non-Chinese friends and move entirely in Chinese circles. The Chinese Communist Party exploits this isolation to expand its influence beyond its borders. The news, entertainment and ideas of Chinese students are controlled and influenced by the Chinese government. Dissenting students fear speaking out because of the further isolation they may face if their fellow Chinese students rule them persona non grata. It means they hardly come into contact with the ideas on which our democratic society was built. It means that they have never heard of Liu Xiaobo. At the forefront of the Chinese government's grip on overseas students is the Chinese Students and Scholars Association, which has branches at nearly every university in Australia. CSSAs are active adherents to a mentality that exacerbates the divide between Chinese students and the university community. It encourages them to consider anyone who deviates from the party world view as the enemy. Due to my student reporting, I have been the target of that enemy mentality and subjected to intimidation. That same mentality has been highlighted by a recent spate of complaints against Australian lecturers who have been criticised by their Chinese students for displaying a perceived anti-China sentiment, including one lecturer who used a map showing borders between China and India not sanctioned by Beijing. Mr Garnaut, now an independent consultant, last month told a higher education summit, that universities needed to be aware of the "red hot patriotism" that China was encouraging on Australian campuses and the potential risk to national security. Liu Xiaobo wrote of pushing for a change in regime by focusing on gradual change in society. Yet here in Australia, the trendy bureaucratic idea of "China engagement" dominates. This means Australia's politicians and diplomats seek to influence China through private representations and high-level meetings. Australia's large Chinese and ethnic-Chinese population is left out in the cold to be snatched up by the Chinese government. With more than 100,000 Chinese students studying in Australia, we have an incredible opportunity to help realise Liu's goal of societal change. We must end the isolation of Chinese students in Australia. Universities need to implement real plans to help them connect with the kinds of people and ideas they won't find in China. We are letting Chinese residents and students feel afraid of their government – and each other – when they are in Australia. They need to be encouraged to access uncensored information. They need to feel confident the Chinese government won't harass them and their family if they break ranks. They need our universities to demonstrate their commitment to freedom, and not just their commitment to Chinese money. Only by doing this can we influence China and make a genuine stand for the rights and dignity of the Chinese people. To do so would be the highest form of tribute to Liu Xiaobo's life and ideals. Alexander Joske is a student at the Australian National University and a researcher at Charles Sturt University.

Teachers wearing "Black Lives Matter" t-shirts join with students at a rally Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2016 at Garfield High School in Seattle. Teachers, students and parents across Seattle public schools wore the shirts Wednesday to promote racial equity in schools. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren) SEATTLE (AP) — Teachers, students and parents across Seattle public schools wore "Black Lives Matter" T-shirts Wednesday to promote racial equity in schools. Event organizers say many educators in Washington's largest school district are voluntarily using the day to lead discussions about institutional racism, teach about black history and hold rallies. Organizer Jesse Hagopian, a history teacher at Garfield High School, said the day of action also offers opportunities to address racial inequities in Seattle schools. About 53 percent of the district's 53,000 students are non-white, with blacks making up the largest minority group at 16 percent. "It's also important to understand that for black lives to matter, black education has to matter," Hagopian told KUOW-FM. "This movement is also broader than police accountability. In a school system as dramatically unequal as ours, it's incumbent upon educators and families to stand up and say something about this." About 2,000 "Black Lives Matter" T-shirts quickly sold out, and hundreds more were printed, he said. Some people posted photos on social media Wednesday showing them wearing those shirts or wearing their own spray-painted ones. Blue Lives Matters, a group of active and retired law enforcement officers, has criticized the action as inappropriate, saying public employees shouldn't be pushing the "political message." The 5,000-member union representing Seattle educators, however, is backing it. "Eliminating the opportunity gap and providing an equitable quality public education is at the forefront of our mission," the Seattle Education Association said in a statement. Meanwhile, the school district is in the middle of a weeklong campaign to close racial disparities in achievement, discipline and other areas. "Eliminating the opportunity gaps really is the issue of our time," Superintendent Larry Nyland said in a statement last week. "We have not as a district or as a nation done well at serving all of our students of color or serving all of our students that quality for free and reduced and lunch." African-American students were suspended or expelled at a rate four times higher than white students in the 2013-2014 school year, according to the district. Students of color received a high school diploma at a significantly lower rate than their white counterparts. Victoria Nunes and her 6-year-old daughter joined several dozen others in wearing Black Lives Matter shirts to Queen Anne Elementary School on Wednesday. "I feel like it's my duty as a parent of a student in public schools, and someone who lives life with empathy, to get involved," she said in an interview. "It's a conscious-raising event. Schools are part of society. This is what's happening in society, and it deserves and demands our attention."

The city's annual $700,000 telecommunications contract with Rogers should not be renewed because the company has provided poor service at ever-increasing cost, according to a staff report. Instead the city should strike a partnership with Hamilton Community Energy (HCE) Telecom, a subsidiary of city-owned Hamilton Utilities Corporation, says the report from the Information Technology Division. Rogers has been the city's telecom provider since 2011, after Rogers bought Atria Networks, the city's provider at the time (Atria had previously swallowed FibreWired Hamilton.) Last year the city conducted a nine-month pilot project with HCE to determine if it could manage the city's telecom needs — which means operating fibre optic cable connections at 150 locations where the city has staff, ranging from the Lister Block downtown to a transit building on Upper James Street near Mount Hope. But not in City Hall — the city already operates its own fibre network there. Based on the successful pilot and "ongoing issues with Rogers" the city should hire the local company, wrote Peter MacNeil, the city's chief of IT security. If the new arrangement goes ahead, HCE would expand its fibre network to deliver as much of the service as possible, and where necessary contract out services from a provider like Rogers. Troy Hare, president of HCE Telecom, said it would represent a great opportunity for both his company and the city to "improve customer service and drive innovation with a local focus … We'll deliver the best solution for the situation." Expanding the network would have economic development benefits, suggested MacNeil, if HCE runs fibre to locations such as those where industrial or waterfront development is taking place, "partly to service us and partly to provide a highway for others who might need it." The staff recommendation will be tabled at the Hamilton Utilities Corporation Joint Advisory Committee. Ward 15 Councillor Judi Partridge said in an email that Rogers has increased its bill by five per cent annually over each of the last five years. "The bottom line," she wrote, "is whether the service received from the Rogers contact over the past few years has been good value for the taxpayers."

Drexel University researchers have demonstrated how their microswimming robots can deliver medicine to targeted areas and perform surgery inside the body. The “microswimmers” are essentially beads that come together in order to reach faster speeds when travelling through a liquid. Once they’ve reached their target, the beads can separate and be individually controlled to deliver their medicinal payload or targeted treatments. “We believe microswimmer robots could one day be used to carry out medical procedures and deliver more direct treatments to affected areas inside the body,” said U Kei Cheang, PhD, and postdoctoral research fellow in Drexel’s College of Engineering, U Kei Cheang. “They can be highly effective for these jobs because they’re able to navigate in many different biological environments, such as the blood stream and the microenvironment inside a tumour.” When linked, the microswimming robots move by spinning, and the more the robots spin the faster they move. In a paper published in Nature Scientific Reports, the researchers documented how the longest chain that was examined by the group – 13-beads in length – was able to reach speeds of 17.85 microns per second. This dynamic propulsion system is also the key to getting the robots to divide into shorter segments. Once the robots reach a certain rate of rotation the chain separates and smaller beads remain that can move independently of each other. Having separated, the robots can be manipulated and made to move in different directions if required. “To disassemble the microswimmer we simply increased the rotation frequency,” Cheang said. “For a seven-bead microswimmer, we showed that by upping the frequency 10-15 cycles the hydrodynamic stress on the swimmer physically deformed it by creating a twisting effect, which leads to disassembly into a three-bead and four-bead swimmer.” Drexel University is partnering with ten institutions of research and medicine from around the world to develop this technology for performing minimally invasive surgery on blocked arteries. But the work it has been doing on microswimmer robots represents the culmination of nearly a decade’s work into understanding the biomedical applications of microrobots. “For applications of drug delivery and minimally invasive surgery, future work remains to demonstrate the different assembled configurations can achieve navigation through various in vivo environments, and can be constructed to accomplish different tasks during operative procedures,” the study’s authors write. “But we believe that the mechanistic insight into the assembly process we discussed in this research will greatly aid future efforts at developing configurations capable of achieving these crucial abilities.”

A police officer tries to block an activist from advancing past the steps to the state courthouse in St. Louis. (REUTERS/Adrees Latif) Joel Shults is a retired police chief for Adams State University in Colorado. He has worked for more than 30 years in uniformed law enforcement and criminal justice education. I admit that in a cropped photo it’s hard to distinguish the Gaza Strip from Ferguson, Mo. But the violence that occurred in the St. Louis suburb this month following the shooting of a black teenager by a white police officer isn’t the authoritarian injustice that it has been portrayed to be. It may be hard to hear, but we live quite safely in the United States thanks in large part to our law enforcement system. We experience civil unrest and cruel conflict vicariously, not personally. And our exposure to deadly violence largely comes from the news and entertainment world. I don’t blame anyone for being shocked and offended when an armed government agent hurts or kills a civilian. Our humane, visceral reaction easily overshadows cold facts. But facts will define the truth in our courts and the truth is that physics and anatomy make sense of a shooting like Officer Darren Wilson’s encounter with Michael Brown. While I don’t have unique access to the details of that deadly encounter, I am familiar with the science of officer-involved shootings. Based on that science, I can confidently dispel some commonly held beliefs about law enforcement and use of force that have colored the debate around Brown’s death. 1. “Police shouldn’t shoot an unarmed teenager.” No gun doesn’t mean no threat. FBI murder statistics consistently show that more people are beaten to death with hands and feet each year than are killed by assault rifles. Of the 465 weapons used to commit murder in Missouri in 2012, more than one in four were not firearms. A person’s size doesn’t mean that they are aggressive, but one’s stature is clearly a factor in a fight. 2. “Even if he did feel threatened, Wilson didn’t have to shoot Brown so many times.” Brain processes take time and often move slower than reality. A study published in 2003 showed that it takes a shooter about one-third of a second to recognize a threat, then each trigger pull takes one-tenth of a second. But the mental process of deciding to stop shooting takes longer than the decision to shoot. The result is that another two or three shots can be fired as the senses, brain, nerves, and muscles put on the brakes. In other words, an officer can execute several trigger pulls after a visual input indicates a subject is no longer a threat. Further, multiple shots don’t guarantee that a person will not continue to advance or attack. And it can take over a second for a body to fall to the ground after being fatally shot. This leaves even more time for shots to be fired before an officer’s finger stops pulling the trigger. In total, whatever happened in Ferguson likely happened in the time it takes to sing the first four words of the national anthem — and the officer was forced to make quick decisions to keep up. 3. “Why do police keep killing all these unarmed people?” Commentators like to infect sentences with phrase like “increased police violence” and “all these brutality cases.” A society in which children will see 16,000 murders as entertainment on television by the time they are eligible to vote will find it quite easy to believe that the police are shooting up their cities just like on their favorite cop show. But reality is much tamer than popular belief. Police use of force is rare. A study cited by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that out of a reported 45 million face-to-face contacts annually between citizens and the police, fewer than 1 percent of those citizens reported any use of force. Of those who did report use of force, 74 percent self-reported that their own behavior instigated the force. The most recent FBI crime report cites 410 people justifiably killed by police in 2011, the most recent FBI reporting period, 310 people killed by citizens acting in self-defense, and a 10-year average of 54 police officers killed in the line of duty. A study reported in 2012 in the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin shows that 70 percent of police officers will face a deadly force decision an average of four times within a career. Just 20 percent shoot, and few kill. For many, no facts will invade their opinion. But the current climate of mistrust is not sustainable. To repair the relationship, citizens must calm the rhetoric that assumes our nation’s police ranks are filled with psychotic brutes. Police leaders must take a breath and make innovative efforts to communicate with an unsettled public. Violent men and woman will continue to threaten our communities and police will continue to seek better ways to respond to the violence they encounter. Together the great American spirit of balancing freedom with responsibility can be the unifying force of reform wherever it is needed. Correction: This piece originally stated that nearly a third of 2011 murders were committed without firearms. That statistic is incorrect. Data from the Missouri State Highway Patrol show that about 24 percent of all weapons used in murders that year were not firearms. The essay was updated to reflect 2012 data. More from PostEverything: I’m a cop. If you don’t want to get hurt, don’t challenge me. What caused the Ferguson riot exists in so many other cities, too. Michael Brown: Yet another reminder that police see even unarmed black people as thugs.

Canadian Internet watchers may recall a controversy in late 2007 when Rogers began experimenting with adding its own content to webpages that its subscribers visit. The company used the technology to alert customers about their data usage. Google was one of the targets of the experiments and the company reacted angrily: We are concerned about these reports. As a general principle, we believe that maintaining the Internet as a neutral platform means that carriers shouldn't be able to interfere with Web content without users' permission. We are in the process of contacting the relevant parties to bring this to a quick resolution. According to one of my blog readers, the Rogers content substitution approach is back. The image below shows Rogers warning a customer about the expiry of some parental controls. The warning is included in a Flickr page. This approach again raises concerns about Rogers interfering with the delivery of content without permission of the end user. When combined with its ongoing policy of redirecting web pages that do not resolve to a company-sponsored paid search page, Rogers own content seems to show up unasked on a regular basis.

Tefillin (Askhenazic: ; Israeli Hebrew: [tfiˈlin], תפילין), are a set of small black leather boxes containing scrolls of parchment inscribed with verses from the Torah. In Rabbinic Judaism, which is the predominant form of Judaism today, tefillin are worn by observant adult Jewish males during weekday morning prayers. In all orthodox communities they are only worn by men. Although "tefillin" is technically the plural form (the singular being "tefillah"), it is loosely used as a singular as well.[1] The arm-tefillah, or shel yad, is placed on the upper arm, and the strap wrapped around the arm/hand, hand and fingers; while the head-tefillah or shel rosh, is placed above the forehead. The Torah commands that they should be worn to serve as a "sign" and "remembrance" that God brought the children of Israel out of Egypt. The biblical scriptures often referenced as referring to tefillin are by their very nature obscure in any literal meaning. Indeed, there is no biblical text which literally names, describes, or mandates tefillin. It is within the Talmud, the authoritative oral tradition of Rabbinic Judaism, where tefillin are named and explained as to what it is that are to be bound to the body and the form that they should take.[2] Deuteronomy 11:18, for instance, is one of the standard texts referenced as supporting the obligation, but it does not designate what specifically to "bind upon your arm", and the definition of totafot between your eyes is not obvious. Karaite Judaism, by contrast, treats the biblical text as metaphorical. Biblical source [ edit ] "Totafot" between your eyes: Ashkenazi Head Tefillin, Jerusalem, Israel The obligation of tefillin, as expounded by the Oral Law, is mentioned four times in the Torah: twice when recalling The Exodus from Egypt: And it shall be for a sign for you upon your hand, and for a memorial between your eyes, that the law of the LORD may be in your mouth; for with a strong hand did the LORD bring you out of Egypt. Exodus 13:9 And it shall be for a sign upon your hand, and as totafot between your eyes; for with a mighty hand did the LORD bring us forth out of Egypt. — Exodus 13:16 and twice in the shema passages: And you shall bind them as a sign upon your arm, and they shall be as totafot between your eyes. — Deuteronomy 6:8 You shall put these words of mine on your heart and on your soul; and you shall tie them for a sign upon your arm, and they shall be as totafot between your eyes. — Deuteronomy 11:18 Etymology [ edit ] The ultimate origin of Hebrew "tefillin" is uncertain.[3] The word "tefillin" is not found in the Bible, which calls them ṭoṭafot. The Septuagint renders "ṭoṭafot" ἀσαλευτόν, "something immovable".[2] Some believe it refers to a charm, similar to the Hebrew neṭifot, "round jewel".[2] The Talmud (Sanhedrin 4b) explains that the word ṭoṭafot is combination of two foreign words: Tot means "two" in the "Caspi" language and Fot means "two" in the "Afriki" language,[4] hence, tot and fot means "two and two", corresponding to the four compartments of the head-tefillin.[5] Menahem ben Saruq explains that the word is derived from the Hebrew Ve'hateif and Tatifoo, both expressions meaning "speech", "for when one sees the tefillin it causes him to remember and speak about The Exodus from Egypt".[6] The first texts to use "tefillin" are the Targumim and Peshitta[2] and it is also used in subsequent Talmudic literature, although the word "ṭoṭafah" was still current, being used with the meaning of "frontlet".[2] "Tefillin" may have derived from the Aramaic palal, "to plead, pray", a word closely related to the Hebrew tefillah, "prayer".[3] Jacob ben Asher (14th century) suggests that "tefillin" is derived from the Hebrew pelilah, "justice, evidence", for tefillin act as a sign and proof of God's presence among the Jewish people.[7] The English word "phylacteries" derives from the Ancient Greek φυλακτήριον phylacterion, meaning "defences", and in late Greek, "amulets" or "charms".[8] The only instance of the name "phylacteries" in ancient times occurs once in the Greek New Testament (Matthew 23:5), whence it has passed into the languages of Europe.[2] Neither Aquila nor Symmachus use the word "phylacteries" in their translations.[2] The choice of this particular Greek equivalent to render the Heb. tefillin bears witness to the ancient functional interpretation of the said device as a kind of an amulet. The other Greek words for "amulet" are periapta or periammata, which literally signifies "things tied around", analogously to the Hebrew qame‘a derived from the root קמע meaning "to bind".[9] Purpose [ edit ] The tefillin are to serve as a reminder of God's intervention at the time of the Exodus from Egypt.[10] Maimonides details of the sanctity of tefillin and writes that "as long as the tefillin are on the head and on the arm of a man, he is modest and God-fearing and will not be attracted by hilarity or idle talk; he will have no evil thoughts, but will devote all his thoughts to truth and righteousness".[11] The Sefer ha-Chinuch (14th century) adds that the purpose of tefillin is to help subjugate a person's worldly desires and encourage spiritual development.[12] Joseph Caro (16th century) explains that tefillin are placed on the arm adjacent to the heart and on the head above the brain to demonstrate that these two major organs are willing to perform the service of God.[13] Many have the custom to have high quality tefillin and beautiful tefillin bags as a Hiddur Mitzvah. This idea comes from the verse "This is my God and I will glorify Him" (Exodus 15:2). The Jewish Sages explain: "Is it possible for a human being to add glory to his Creator? What this really means is: I shall glorify Him in the way I perform mitzvot. I shall prepare before Him a beautiful lulav, beautiful sukkah, beautiful fringes (Tsitsit), and beautiful phylacteries (Tefilin)."[14][15][16] Some non-onthodox scholars think that tefillin may play an apotropaic function. For instance, Yehudah B. Cohn argues that the tefillin should be perceived as an invented tradition aimed at counteracting the popularity of the Greek amulets with an "original" Jewish one.[17] Joshua Trachtenberg considered every ornament worn on the body (whatever its declared function) as initially serving the purpose of an amulet.[18] In addition, the early Rabbinic sources furnish more or less explicit examples of the apotropaic qualities of tefillin. For instance, Numbers Rabbah 12:3 presents tefillin as capable of defeating "a thousand demons" emerging on "the left side", rabbis Yohanan and Nahman used their sets to repel the demons inhabiting privies[19], whereas Elisha the Winged, who was scrupulous in performing this mitzvah, was miraculously saved from the Roman persecution.[20][21] Also, tefillin are believed to possess life-lengthening qualities,[22] and they are often listed in one breath among various items which are considered amuletic in nature.[23][24] Manufacture and contents [ edit ] Leather moulded into shape for the head-tefillin The single scroll of the arm-tefillin The manufacturing processes of both the boxes and the parchment scrolls are intricate and governed by hundreds of detailed rules.[26] In earlier Talmudic times, tefillin were either cylindrical or cubical, but later the cylindrical form became obsolete.[27] Nowadays the boxes should be fashioned from a single piece of animal hide and form a base with an upper compartment to contain the parchment scrolls.[28] They are made in varying levels of quality. The most basic form, called peshutim ("simple"), are made using several pieces of parchment to form the inner walls of the head tefillin. The higher quality tefillin, namely dakkot ("thin"), made by stretching a thin piece of leather, and the more durable gassot ("thick") are both fashioned from the single piece of hide.[29] Black leather straps (retsu'ot) pass through the rear of the base and are used to secure the tefillin onto the body.[2] On both sides of the head-tefillin, the Hebrew letter shin (ש) is moulded; the shin on the wearer's left side has four branches instead of three. The knot of the head-tefillin strap forms the letter dalet ( ד) or double dalet ( ד) (known as the square-knot) while the strap that is passed through the arm-tefillin is formed into a knot in the shape of the letter yud ( י). These three letters spell Shaddai ( י ד ש), one of the names of God.[2] The texts have to be written with halachically acceptable (acceptable according to Jewish law) ink on halachically acceptable parchment. There are precise rules for writing the texts and any error invalidates it. For example, the letters of the text must be written in order - if a mistake is found later, it can't be corrected as the replacement letter would have been written out of sequence. There are 3188 letters on the parchments, and it can take a scribe as long as 15 hours to write a complete set. The scribe is required to purify himself in the mikvah (ritual bath) before he starts work. Parchment scrolls [ edit ] The four biblical passages which refer to the tefillin, mentioned above, are written on scrolls and placed inside the leather boxes.[2] The arm-tefillin has one large compartment, which contains all four biblical passages written upon a single strip of parchment; the head-tefillin has four separate compartments in each of which one scroll of parchment is placed.[2][30] This is because the verses describe the hand-tefillin in the singular ("sign"), while in three of four verses, the head-tefillin is described in the plural ("totafot"). The passages are written by a scribe with special ink on parchment scrolls (klaf).[2] These are: "Sanctify to me ..." (Exodus 13:1–10); "When YHWH brings you ..." (Exodus 13:11–16); "Hear, O Israel ..." (Deuteronomy 6:4–9); and "If you observe My Commandments ..." (Deuteronomy 11:13-21).[2] The Hebrew Ashuri script must be used and there are three main styles of lettering used: Beis Yosef – generally used by Ashkenazim; Arizal – generally used by Hasidim; Velish – used by Sefardim.[31] The passages contain 3,188 letters, which take a sofer (scribe) between 10–15 hours to complete.[32] There was considerable discussion among the commentators of the Talmud about the order in which the scrolls should be inserted into the four compartments of the head-tefillin.[2] In the Middle Ages, a famous debate on the issue was recorded between Rashi and his grandson Rabbeinu Tam.[2] Rashi held that the passages are placed according to the chronological order as they appear in the Torah: Kadesh Li, Ve-haya Ki Yeviehcha, Shema, Ve-haya Im Shemoa, while according to Rabbeinu Tam, the last two passages are switched around.[33] Of the tefillin dating from the 1st-century CE discovered at Qumran in the Judean Desert, some were made according to the order understood by Rashi and others in the order of Rabbeinu Tam.[33] The prevailing custom is to arrange the scrolls according to Rashi's view, but some pious Jews are also accustomed to briefly lay the tefillin of Rabbeinu Tam as well,[33] a custom of the Ari adopted by the Hasidim.[34] The placement of the protrusion of a tuft of the sinew (se'ar eigel) identifies as to which opinion the tefillin were written.[35] The Vilna Gaon, who wore the tefillin of Rashi, rejected the stringency of also laying Rabbeinu Tam, pointing out that there were sixty-four permutations for the arrangement of the tefillin scrolls.[36] Obligation and gender [ edit ] The duty of laying tefillin rests upon Jews after the age of thirteen years.[2] Although women were traditionally exempt from the obligation, some early codifers allowed them to do so.[37] Moses Isserles (16th century), however, strongly discourages it.[38] Historically, the mitzvah of tefillin was not performed by women, but the ritual was apparently kept by some women in medieval France and Germany.[39] Traditions exist of some prominent women laying tefillin. Rashi's daughters allegedly wore tefillin, as did the wife of Chaim ibn Attar and the female Hasidic Rebbe known as Maiden of Ludmir.[40] In modern times, people of all genders choose to wear tefillin, and are encouraged to do so by some.[41] In 2018, a group of students from Hebrew College, a non-denominational rabbinical school in Boston, created a series of YouTube videos to help people of all genders learn how to wrap tefillin.[42] Within the Orthodox movement, it remains a male-only obligation, but in egalitarian movements, women may take it up as an obligation. Women affiliated to the Conservative movement wrap tefillin.[43] Since 2013, SAR High School in Riverdale, New York, has allowed girls to wrap tefillin during morning prayer; it is probably the first Modern Orthodox high school in the U.S. to do so.[44] The wearing of tefillin by members of Women of the Wall at the Western Wall caused consternation from the rabbi in charge of the site until a Jerusalem District Court judge ruled in 2013 that doing so was not a violation of "local custom".[45] A mourner during the first day of his mourning period is exempt from wrapping tefillin as is a bridegroom on his wedding-day.[2] A sufferer from stomach-trouble or one who is otherwise in pain and cannot concentrate his mind is also exempt.[2] One who is engaged in the study of the Law and scribes of and dealers in tefillin and mezuzot while engaged in their work if it cannot be postponed, are also free from this obligation.[2] The codes view the commandment of tefillin as important, and call those who neglect to observe it "transgressors".[46] Maimonides counts the commandment of laying the arm-tefillin and head-tefillin as two separate positive mitzvot.[11] The Talmud cites Rav Sheshet who said that by neglecting the precept, one transgresses eight positive commandments.[47] A report of widespread laxity in its observance is reported by Moses of Coucy in 13th-century Spain. It may have arisen from the fear of persecution, similar to what had occurred to the Jews living in the Land of Israel under Roman rule in the 2nd-century.[10] Performance [ edit ] Originally tefillin were worn all day, but not during the night. Nowadays the prevailing custom is to wear them only during the weekday morning service,[48] although some individuals wear them at other times during the day as well. Tefillin are not donned on Shabbat and the major festivals because these holy days are themselves considered "signs" which render the need of the "sign" of tefillin superfluous. On the fast day of Tisha B'Av, tefillin are not worn in the morning, as tefillin are considered an "adornment", symbols of beauty, which is deemed inappropriate for a day of mourning. They are worn instead at the afternoon Mincha service.[49] There are those however who have a custom (Jews from Aleppo, Syria) on Tisha B'Av to privately put on tefillin at home and pray privately, say the Amidah and take off the tefillin and go to synagogue to finish the prayers.[citation needed] Chol HaMoed [ edit ] On Chol HaMoed (intermediate days) of Pesach and Sukkot, there is a great debate among the early halachic authorities as to whether tefillin should be worn or not. Those who forbid it consider the "sign" of intermediate days as having the same status as the festival itself, making the ritual of tefillin redundant.[50] Others argue and hold that Chol HaMoed does not constitute a "sign" in which case tefillin must be laid.[50] Three customs evolved resulting from the dispute: In light of the conflicting opinions, the Mishna Berura (20th-century) recommends Ashkenazim make the following stipulation before donning tefillin: "If I am obligated to don tefillin I intend to fulfill my obligation and if I am not obligated to don tefillin, my doing so should not be considered as fulfilling any obligation" and that the blessing not be recited.[51] How to put on tefillin [ edit ] Ashkenazim put on and remove the arm tefillin while standing in accordance to the Shulchan Aruch, while most Sephardim do so while sitting in accordance with the Ari. All, however, put on and remove the head tefillin while standing.[52] It is forbidden to speak or be distracted while putting on the tefillin.[52] An Ashkenazi says two blessings when laying tefillin, the first before he ties the arm-tefillin: ...lehani'ach tefillin ("to bind tefillin"), and the second after placing the head tefillin: ...al mitzvat tefillin ("as to the commandment of tefillin"); thereafter, he tightens the head straps and says "Baruch Shem Kovod..." ("blessed be the holy name").[53] The Sephardic custom is that no blessing is said for the head-tefillin, the first blessing sufficing for both.[53] Sephardim and many members of the Chabad Orthodox movement only recite the blessing on the head-tefillah if they spoke about something not related to tefillin since reciting the blessing on the arm-tefillah. Procedure [ edit ] The arm-tefillin is laid on the inner side of the bare left arm, right arm if one is left handed, two finger breadths above the elbow, so that when the arm is bent the tefillin faces towards the heart.[2] The arm-tefillin is tightened with the thumb, the blessing is said, and the strap is immediately wrapped around the upper arm in the opposite direction it came from in order to keep the knot tight without having to hold it. Some wrap it around the upper arm for less than a full revolution (the bare minimum to keep the knot tight) and then wrap it around the forearm seven times, while others wrap it around the upper arm an additional time before wrapping it around the forearm. Many Ashkenazim wear the knot to be tightened (not to be confused with the knot on the base which is permanently tied and always worn on the inside, facing the heart) on the inside and wrap inward, while Nusach Sephard Ashkenazim and all Sephardim wear it on the outside and wrap outward.[2][citation needed] Then the head-tefillin is placed on the middle of the head just above the forehead, so that no part rests below the hairline. A bald or partially bald person's original hairline is used.[54] The knot of the head-tefillin sits at the back of the head, upon the part of the occipital bone that protrudes just above the nape. The two straps of the head-tefillin are brought in front of the shoulders, with their blackened side facing outwards.[2] Now the remainder of the arm-tefillin straps are wound three times around the middle finger and around the hand to form the shape of the Hebrew letter of either a shin ( ש) according to Ashkenazim, or a dalet ( ד) according to Sephardim. There are various customs regarding winding the strap on the arm and hand.[53] In fact, the arm strap is looped for counter-clockwise wrapping with Ashkenazi tefillin while it is knotted for clockwise wrapping with Sephardic and Hasidic tefillin. On removing the tefillin, the steps are reversed.[2] Biblical passages [ edit ] Location Passage Exodus 13:1–10: Kadesh Li— the duty of the Jewish people to remember the redemption from Egyptian bondage. And the L ORD spoke to Moses, saying: 'Sanctify to Me all the first-born, whatever opens the womb among the children of Israel, both of man and of animal, it is Mine.' And Moses said to the people: 'Remember this day, in which you came out from Egypt, out of the house of bondage; for by strength of hand the L ORD brought you out from this place; no leavened bread shall be eaten. This day you go forth in the Spring month. And it shall be when the L ORD shall bring you into the land of the Canaanite, and the Hittite, and the Amorite, and the Hivite, and the Jebusite, which He swore unto your fathers to give you, a land flowing with milk and honey, that you shall keep this service in this month. Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread, and the seventh day shall be a feast to the L ORD . Unleavened bread shall be eaten throughout the seven days; and no leavened bread shall be seen with you, neither shall there be leaven seen with you, in all your borders. And so shall you tell your son on that day, saying: It is because of that which the L ORD did for me when I came forth out of Egypt. And it shall be for a sign for you upon your hand, and as a memorial between your eyes, that the law of the L ORD may be in your mouth; for with a strong hand has the L ORD brought you out of Egypt. You shalt therefore keep this ordinance in its season from year to year. Exodus 13:11–16: Ve-haya Ki Yeviakha— the obligation of every Jew to inform his or her children on these matters. When the L ORD brings you into the land of the Canaanite, as He swore unto you and to your fathers, and shall give it to you, you shall set apart to the L ORD all that opens the womb; every firstborn animal shall be the L ORD 'S. Every firstborn donkey you shall redeem with a sheep, and if you will not redeem it, then you shall break its neck; and all the first-born of man among your sons shall you redeem. And when your son asks you in time to come, saying: What is this? say to him: By strength of hand the L ORD bring us out from Egypt, from the house of bondage; and when Pharaoh found it hard to let us go the L ORD killed all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both the first-born of man, and the first-born of animals; therefore I sacrifice to the L ORD all males that open the womb, and redeem all my first-born sons. And it shall be for a sign upon your hand, and as "totafot" between your eyes; for by strength of hand the L ORD brought us forth out of Egypt. Deuteronomy 6:4–9: Shema— pronouncing the Unity of the One God. Hear, O Israel: the L ORD our God, the L ORD is one. And you shall love the L ORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. And these words, which I command you this day, shall be upon your heart; and teach them thoroughly to your children, and speak of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk on the road, and when you lie down, and when you get up. And tie them for a sign upon your hand, and let them be "totafot" between your eyes. And write them on the door-posts of your house and on your gates. Deuteronomy 11:13–21: Ve-haya Im Shamoa— God's assurance of reward for observance of the Torah's precepts and warning of retribution for disobedience. If you listen to My commandments which I command you today, to love the L ORD your God, and to serve Him with all your heart and with all your soul, then I will give the rain of your land in its season, the early and the late rain, and you will gather in your grain, your wine, and your oil. And I will give grass in your fields for your cattle, and you will eat and be satisfied. Take care for yourselves, lest your heart be seduced, and you turn aside, and serve other gods, and worship them; and the anger of the L ORD be lit against you, and He shut up the heaven, so that there shall be no rain, and the ground not yield her fruit; and you be quickly lost from off the good land which the L ORD gives you. Put these words of Mine on your heart and on your soul; tie them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be "totafot" between your eyes. Teach them to your children, to speak of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk on the road, and when you lie down, and when you rise up. And write them on the door-posts of your house, and upon your gates; so that your days, and those of your children, may be multiplied upon the land which the L ORD swore unto your fathers to give them, as the days of the heavens above the earth. See also [ edit ] References [ edit ] Further reading [ edit ]

Rob Kelley and the Redskins can be more productive on the ground. (Evan Habeeb/Getty Images) While the Redskins offense was one of the more productive in the NFL last season, it was very one-sided. The passing game carried the offense while the rushing attack trailed behind. All season, Coach Jay Gruden was asked about striking a balance between the two, and Gruden agreed it was important. But he also alluded to two main issues holding back the running game. After playing the Cowboys in Week 12, when starting running back Rob Kelley had just 37 yards on 14 carries, Gruden pointed to issues with the blocking. The offensive line struggled to pick up movement and different stunts the Cowboys’ defense used against the run. [For Clinton Portis, fun had an expiration date] “[The Cowboys] had great movement up front; we didn’t handle their movement very good,” Gruden explained. “They were stunting and pirating and all of that stuff, we didn’t handle it very well. Robert ran it extremely hard, I mean he ran hard and his stats do him injustice for as hard as he ran, so I’m happy the way he ran the ball.” That quote puts the blame squarely on the offensive line. Dealing with stunts and movement, as Gruden described, was a consistent problem all season. The Cowboys were one of the better teams at exploiting that weakness. This is a fairly common look from both the offense and defense. The Redskins are in 11 personnel (one running back, one tight end, three wide receivers), while the Cowboys use a 4-2 nickel front. This should be a good look for the Redskins to run on. They choose an outside zone run, which should be blocked as drawn above. However, the Cowboys are very familiar with the Redskins’ zone running game, having seen it for years. They run a simple stunt up front, sending the three technique defensive tackle inside into the A gap to the left of the center, while linebacker Sean Lee uses his athleticism to work over the top. The stunt inside by the defensive tackle messes up the Redskins’ blocking targets. Center Spencer Long is meant to work up to the second level and pick up Lee, but instead is surprised by the defensive tackle and has to pick him up instead. Left guard Shawn Lauvao is also surprised by the stunt and initially attempts to block the tackle inside, but he then realizes he has to switch responsibilities with Long because Long can no longer reach the linebacker. That flash of hesitation is enough for an athletic linebacker such as Lee to beat Lauvao to the hole and make the tackle. [Matt Jones’s best hope for reviving his NFL career? A coach who has been there.] This is one of the more frequent stunts the Redskins’ offensive line faces in the run game, and it will continue to be until they improve on picking it up. Crashing defensive lineman inside can be risky for opposing defenses — they need to have the speed to do it — but it has proven to be effective, particularly for the Cowboys against the Redskins. One of the Redskins’ more productive runs this past season was the sweep play. Here, they try it against the Cowboys. Both center Long and right guard Brandon Scherff pull from their original positions and work to the edge. Right tackle Morgan Moses and tight end Vernon Davis have to down block and cover the gap created by the two pullers. [Where things stand in the Kirk Cousins contract talks] The Cowboys have the perfect stunt called. The play-side defensive end and tackle both stunt inside, into the gaps vacated by the pulling lineman. Meanwhile, they walk a safety down into the box and have Lee work over the top outside to cover their two stunting defensive linemen. With the defensive tackle stunting inside, Moses can’t reach him in time to cut him off. That gives the tackle a free run into the backfield. Running back Chris Thompson does a good job breaking the initial tackle, but the rest of the defense rallies to the ball and makes the tackle for a loss. Movement and stunts from opposing defensive fronts is certainly something the Redskins need to work on in training camp if they are to improve going into the season. Having a settled offensive line should help in that regard. The Redskins lost starting center Kory Lichtensteiger last year and Long had to take over in the middle of the season, having very little experience at center. That leads to the other main problem that plagued the Redskins running game last year. An underrated part of playing the center position is having to make all the calls and adjustments, making sure everyone is on the same page and targeting the right defenders to block. Throughout the season, Gruden often said they had a few issues with missed targeting, particularly after the Panthers game where Kelley took nine carries for just eight yards. “We mistargeted a couple runs for whatever reason,” he said. “So not a lot of good looks for Rob, unfortunately.” Later, Gruden elaborated. “We had another outside zone that we didn’t target it out to the outside backer. There were a couple things, schematically, that we were not sound.” Targeting is usually the job of the center; it’s perhaps the most important part of the position. It’s a difficult thing to do, which is why the Cowboys spent a first-round pick on Travis Frederick and more recently, the Colts spend a first-round pick on Ryan Kelly. Long took over the starting center role for the Redskins during the season and it would have taken awhile to fully settle in to that amount of responsibility. Clearly, there were still issues to iron out toward the end of the season as those quotes from Gruden came after the Week 15 loss to the Panthers. This is perhaps the play Gruden was referring to. The Redskins run an outside zone from 12 personnel (one running back, two tight ends). With two tight ends aligned on the same side of the formation, the Panthers adjust their defensive front, shifting their linebackers over to account for the extra gaps created on the tight end side. The Redskins run a fairly standard outside zone run for the most part, with a double team from right tackle Moses and tight end Davis that should result in one of them working up to pick up the Mike ‘backer. However, tight end Derek Carrier sifts back across the line to pick up the back side defensive end. Typically, the back side defensive end is accounted for by the quarterback faking a roll out. Carrier’s sift back across the line leaves the Sam ‘backer unaccounted for. Carrier’s block has two negative effects on the play. It leaves the Sam unaccounted for, which leaves an unblocked edge that forces Kelley to cut his run back instantly. But the Mike ‘backer also keys Carrier and immediately works back inside, meaning neither part of the Moses and Davis double team are able to work inside to pick him up. As Kelley takes the handoff, he has no choice but to cut back early because of the unblocked Sam, but as he cuts back, he has the Mike inside waiting for him. The back side of the offensive line also fails to make their blocks and Kelley is left with nowhere to go. It wasn’t the only play where the Panthers had unblocked linebackers either. This time, the Redskins face a lighter box, but confusion still arises. It’s tough to say for sure exactly how the blocking should have been set without knowing the play call, but it resulted in Lauvao working up to the second level to take on the strong safety while the Mike ‘backer is left completely unblocked. Kelley’s first step from the snap indicates he’s reading the defensive end, and thus running an outside zone. Left tackle Trent Williams kicks him outside, leading Kelley to cut back inside to his second read, the defensive tackle. Long struggles to pick up the defensive tackle initially, forcing Kelly to cut his run back further. The Mike then has a clear path to Kelley and charges down. Scherff attempts to work off his double team to pick up the Mike, but then Moses has to take his block and that leaves the other linebacker unblocked. He makes the tackle on Kelley to prevent him from picking up any yards. Targeting problems cannot happen at the NFL level. It’s one thing to be beaten by movement and stunting defensive linemen, but to be beaten because the offensive line wasn’t on the same page and linebackers were left unblocked is a case of beating yourself. Long should improve with the calls with a full offseason schedule as the starting center; this time last year he was still splitting time at both center and guard after all. Having continuity along the line should also help them improve at dealing with movement and picking up stunts. Solving those two issues would go a long way to helping the Redskins improve their ground game and take a little pressure off the passing attack, which has shouldered too much of the load under Gruden. He definitely has a tendency to pass far more than he runs, but under him, the Redskins’ rushing attack has regressed significantly. Washington’s running game has fallen from the fifth in the league during Mike Shanahan’s last year in 2013, to the 21st ranked unit last season under Gruden. In 2013, Washington averaged 135.2 rushing yards per game, but last season it averaged just 106 yards per game. The Redskins also averaged about five carries per game fewer last season than they did under Shanahan in 2013. The players need to improve their aspects of the run game, but Gruden also needs to show more of a commitment to it than he has in the past if he wants to see it climb back up the rankings.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. – Preseason workouts, especially under the supervision of Louisville City FC Head Coach James O’Connor, are designed to provide a strong baseline for every player as they work toward the new season. For Louisville’s players, though, the camaraderie that comes with being reunited with teammates helps ward off the stresses that come with the work ahead. “Being off, on your own, back at home, you’re trying to stay fit, but when you’re back with the guys it’s a lot more fun to get back to fitness, get back strength, get some touches on the ball,” said goalkeeper Greg Ranjitsingh this week. “It’s great to be back with the guys, more and more are coming in every day, so soon we’ll be at a full squad.” An Eastern Conference Finalist in the USL Cup Playoffs in each of its first two seasons, Louisville has quickly established itself as one of the top teams in the USL’s Eastern Conference. A penalty shootout defeat to the New York Red Bulls II last October brought the 2016 season to a deflating end, but also accentuated how close the side had become during the offseason as players took time off before restarting their individual preparation for 2017. “It’s nice to finally be back with the guys,” said midfielder Mark Anthony Kaye. “You end up being with them for a whole year, and then [being] away from them for three months you realize you do actually miss the players, but it’s good now, we’re doing some workouts to get us ready for down at IMG.”

Share. As the developer wants to focus on The Witcher 3. As the developer wants to focus on The Witcher 3. Polish developer CD Projekt Red has revealed it will be focusing on The Witcher 3 for the next couple of years, before speaking about Cyberpunk 2077. Speaking to Reuters, studio chief executive Adam Kicinski explained that while the company sold over 1.5 million copies of The Witcher 3 before release, compared with 1 million and 1.7 million total annual sales of the first and second games, respectively, there's a firm belief Cyberpunk 2077 can do even better. Exit Theatre Mode "Sales of the third part will be many times higher than with our earlier games. Preorders indicate this," he said. "We broke into the mainstream. It is such a moment in our firm's history that after some years people will look differently at CD Projekt before and after this release. "We hope and we are certain that Cyberpunk has even bigger commercial potential. It is too early to talk about it, though. This year, and the next one will be the years of the Witcher." Cyberpunk 2077 was first announced back in October 2012 and an impressive looking teaser trailer was released in January 2013. The game is described as a mature, futuristic sandbox-style, RPG inspired by the Cyberpunk pen-and-paper RPG system created by Mike Pondsmith. Originally announced for PC, CD Projekt Red hinted at Cyberpunk 2077's possible release for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Cyberpunk 2077 does not have a release date. Exit Theatre Mode In case you missed it earlier today, CD Projekt Red is already hard at work releasing free DLC for The Witcher 3 and, with profits from the game already being channeled into two big expansions coming next year, it sounds like there'll be plenty to keep fans occupied. Luke Karmali is IGN's UK News Editor. You too can revel in mediocrity by following him on Twitter.

CLOSE The Colon family talk about how 40 years later authorities are investigating the possibility of a connection to the double initial case to killings in California. Video story by Marie De Jesus. Marie DeJesus Carmen Colon (Photo: Staff) This story was first published March 1, 2009 Carmen Colon was the first victim. A 10-year-old sprite with an effervescent smile, Carmen lived with her grandparents when she disappeared on Nov. 16, 1971, from the Bull's Head neighborhood in southwest Rochester. Two days later, her crumpled body was found in a gully, lying against a rock, along an infrequently traveled road in the town of Riga, near the Chili border. Perhaps dead for a day, Carmen had been strangled and sexually assaulted. At a time when parents felt safe with children wandering their neighborhoods, Carmen's death shattered a sense of comfort. Police swarmed the city neighborhood for clues, for leads, for resolution. But they were not to come. And more killings would follow. Almost 17 months later, in April 1973, Wanda Walkowicz, 11, vanished from the neighborhood near her Avenue D home. She was found slain the next day in an isolated area at a rest stop in Webster. Six months later, someone grabbed 11-year-old Michelle Maenza off the streets near her Rochester home on Webster Crescent. Her corpse was found two days later in a largely rural stretch of Wayne County in the town of Macedon. Now, nearly 40 years later, the "double initial" killings — dubbed this because each of the victims had matching initials — remain among this region's most notorious unsolved crimes. For police, the cases are far from closed. "At this point, as we have for several years, we feel like we're making progress," said State Police Investigator Thomas Crowley. "The thought that we would be able to solve this someday is always there and keeps us going quite a bit." The four law enforcement agencies — the State Police, Rochester Police Department, and the Monroe and Wayne County sheriff's offices — that keep open files on the abductions and killings regularly discuss possible new leads. Police maintain a database with information about the hundreds of suspects they've identified through the years. And, through technology not available to the original investigators, police now use genetic evidence from the crimes and ask possible suspects for saliva swabs to determine whether there is a match. Police refuse to be more specific about what physical evidence they have. NEWSLETTERS Get the ROC60 newsletter delivered to your inbox We're sorry, but something went wrong Rochester in 60 seconds: Get all the news you need to know in less than a minute. Please try again soon, or contact Customer Service at 1-800-790-9565. Delivery: Invalid email address Thank you! You're almost signed up for ROC60 Keep an eye out for an email to confirm your newsletter registration. More newsletters Police have even exhumed the corpse of one suspect — a city firefighter suspected of being a serial rapist — to compare his DNA with that from a crime scene. For some investigators, solving this case has become a mission. Those now on the case meet with retired former colleagues who investigated the crimes in the 1970s. They talk about theories, suspects and promising leads that may still need attention. Wayne County Sheriff Richard Pisciotti, who is retiring this year after 40 years with the office, was among the investigators of Michelle's murder. He photographed her autopsy in 1973, and now occasionally reviews the file with his current investigators assigned to the case. "Seeing those images is like it happened yesterday," Pisciotti said. "That's something that will never leave me." The day will come, Pisciotti said, when there will be answers. "These kids have never really been put to rest. And until there's a closure to this case, those kids never will be put to rest." From safe to fearful The double initial killings represented a tectonic shift for the Rochester community, a jolting transformation away from a reassuring sense of safety. The slayings had unquestionable similarities. None of the victims lived in a household with both parents. Each had learning difficulties. Each was Roman Catholic. Each disappeared in late afternoon. Each likely was abducted by someone in a car. And no one saw the girls kidnapped, despite the busy neighborhoods where they lived. Also, each girl was sexually assaulted and strangled. The double initials — the slayings have also been dubbed the "alphabet killings" — added another strangely lurid twist to the crimes. Each girl was found in or near an area matching their initials: Carmen near Chili, Wanda in Webster, and Michelle in the town of Macedon. Through the years another bizarre notion has been added to the grisly lore of the slayings: That the killer chose Carmen then Wanda then Michelle not only because of the matching initials but because their initials, when grouped, were an abbreviation for the abductor/killer's possible words to his victims — "Come with me." The macabre crimes made them natural fodder for the mass media. In 2001, the Discovery Channel enlisted the help of retired FBI crime profilers for an hourlong television show in which the sleuths tried to decide who the killer — or killers — could be. Late last year, the movie The Alphabet Killer was released, a fictional supernatural-detective tale filmed in Rochester and based loosely on the slayings. "You have this aura of the initials," said Robert Hetzke, a detective lieutenant with the Wayne County Sheriff's Office who is now involved in the investigation. "Are they connected? Are they not connected? We don't know that." But when Michelle's body was found in November 1973, police then were clearly fearful that they had a serial killer on their hands. "The man who killed Wanda Walkowicz is responsible for this murder," a Rochester police detective lieutenant, the late Anthony Fantigrossi, said after Michelle's slaying. "There's a strong possibility that he's also responsible for killing Carmen Colon." Forensic psychiatrist David Barry, who has worked in the community since the late 1960s, said the similarities of the crimes convinced him then that the slayings had "to be the work of a serial killer." "It seemed to make sense, that somebody was setting out to kill young girls of that age," Barry said. Many potential witnesses On Nov. 18, 1971, two young teenage boys were bicycling along Stearns Road in Riga when they spotted a tiny body in a ditch. At first they thought it was a doll someone had tossed aside. Instead, it was the body of Carmen Colon, who had disappeared two days before after she left a drugstore on West Main Street near her Brown Street home. Carmen had been strangled and sexually assaulted, the medical examiner determined. Fingernail marks scarred her neck and much of her body. Once media accounts circulated about her slaying, another unsettling report came to the fore: Dozens of drivers may have seen Carmen running semi-nude along Interstate 490 westbound about a mile east of Riga. After the discovery of Carmen's body, several drivers reported to police that they'd seen the young girl, almost naked, with a car backing along the shoulder toward her the afternoon of her disappearance. Most cars were driving upward of 70 miles per hour when they passed her and none stopped, with the drivers apparently unsure of what they'd seen. Cell phones, of course, were not in use then. "I know they feel horrible (they didn't stop) and they were courageous enough to come forward after the fact," said Monroe County Sheriff's Office Investigator Patrick Crough, who is now investigating Carmen's death. The police scoured Carmen's neighborhood, as well as the Riga area where she was found. "Everybody (in the Bull's Head neighborhood) knew her," said retired Rochester police detective Vito D'Ambrosio. "We were going door-to-door and everybody knew her." Police developed several suspects. To this day, two former colleagues and friends still think their suspect may have been Carmen's killer. Former Monroe County sheriff's detective Nicholas DeRosa traveled to Puerto Rico to try to hunt down Carmen's uncle, Miguel Colon, who'd left the area shortly after the slaying. In Colon's car police had discovered a doll of Carmen's. The car also appeared to have been scrubbed clean. Colon later returned to New York and was questioned but never charged with the murder. "I was disappointed that they never threw it into the grand jury" to see whether Colon could be indicted, DeRosa said. In 1991, Colon committed suicide inside his Radio Street home after a domestic dispute in which he shot and wounded his wife and brother-in-law. When police responded, Colon yelled at them to shoot him. He then shot himself. Afterward, police questioned relatives about whether Colon had ever admitted to killing Carmen, but none said he had. His family has insisted he is innocent of Carmen's killing. Robert Russello, now retired from the Sheriff's Office, focused on another suspect, James Barber, shortly after Carmen's murder. Barber also quickly took off from the area after Carmen's disappearance, leaving many belongings in his apartment. Barber worked in the Bull's Head area and appeared to have penciled in information on his time card — instead of punching in with an automated system — around the time of the crimes. More importantly, Russello said, was the fact that Barber was wanted on an outstanding warrant for assaulting and sodomizing a 15-year-old girl in Ohio. Barber also is now dead, according to Crough. 'I remember that day' On the day before Rita Walkowicz's 10th birthday, her sister, Wanda, disappeared. "They took her the day before my birthday and I turned 10 when they found her," the sister, now Rita DeCann, said in a recent interview. Wanda was a 65-pound red-haired tomboy, a tiny bundle of frenetic energy. She was a year older than Rita and, as the younger sister now recalls, was more into tussling and joking with the neighborhood boys than playing with Barbies. With their infant sister, Michelle, and mother, Joyce, they lived in the upper apartment of a home on Avenue D. Their father had died earlier of a heart attack. The day of Wanda's disappearance was April 2, 1973, a drizzly gray Monday. "I remember that day very vividly because every Monday, if it's a rainy day, it's very dark for me," Rita said. After school on April 2, Joyce Walkowicz sent Wanda to a Conkey Avenue supermarket for groceries. The sisters often would purchase groceries for the evening meal, Rita said. "Back then we knew nothing about what can happen if you walk to the store," Rita said. At the store, Wanda bought $8.52 worth of groceries, including tuna fish, milk, cupcakes and cat food. She left the store and vanished. The next day, a State Police trooper found Wanda's body in Webster, near the bottom of an embankment at a rest area off of Route 104. Like Carmen Colon, she had been strangled — possibly with a belt — and raped. Like Carmen, she'd disappeared in the late afternoon while running an errand for the family. Police quickly drew parallels with Carmen's killing. Tips rolled in, including reports that a man driving a brown car had pulled a red-haired girl into the car around Conkey Avenue the day of Wanda's abduction. The car did not match the one seen on Interstate 490 in Carmen's case. And, as with Carmen, police could not make an arrest. Months passed with the crime unsolved. Then Michelle Maenza was murdered. And the community's fear reached a fever pitch. After Michelle's body was found in Macedon on Nov. 28, 1973 — two days after she disappeared while walking home in the afternoon — investigators focused on the similarities of the three slayings. "Killings Hauntingly Similar," declared a Democrat and Chronicle headline. Youths who had once relished their childhood with unfettered abandon, playing outside during every free hour, were reined in by fearful parents. "People were very concerned," said forensic psychiatrist Barry. "They were shocked, horrified by the murders ... that someone set out to murder three young girls. God forbid that he should strike again. That just terrified the community, especially since no arrests were made." Michelle, a chubby shy girl, had been at the Goodman Plaza shortly before she went missing, said her brother, Stephen, who was two years older than his sister. Their uncle saw Michelle at the plaza and offered to give her a ride home but she declined, Stephen said. "It must have been shortly after he left the guy picked her up. My uncle was kind of upset with himself for many years because he didn't pick her up ... and go ahead and bring her back to the house." Unlike the first two killings, however, police developed some solid leads about Michelle's disappearance. Later on the day she went missing, a woman saw a young girl resembling Michelle in a car at a fast food restaurant in Penfield. A man was walking toward the car with a bag of food. Michelle's autopsy revealed she'd eaten a hamburger. Also that evening, a man stopped along Route 350 in Walworth after he saw a car stopped with an apparent flat tire. A girl resembling Michelle sat in the car. The man with the flat tire made it apparent he wanted no help, so the would-be good Samaritan continued on his way. Both witnesses gave similar descriptions of the man they saw, and police developed a composite that the media displayed for weeks. Calls came in by the thousands — many of them of little help. In fact, when the calls tapered off, they still numbered about 75 an hour during daytime hours. Police picked up debris along the likely path from the restaurant to Eddy Road where Michelle was found dead, according to Pisciotti. The possible evidence filled the beds of several pickup trucks. The investigation was ongoing when, on Jan. 1, 1974, a Rochester fireman named Dennis Termini tried to rape a teenage girl in a garage. Police intervened, and Termini ran. "We chased him over fences and down the street," said Rochester police Capt. Lynde Johnston, who was among the patrolmen pursuing Termini. Police closed in on him and Termini pulled out a handgun. "He had a .45 automatic pistol and he put it to his head and shot himself," Johnston said. Termini, police decided, had raped another teenager in a garage. While both victims were older than the girls in the double initial murders, investigators thought Termini might be a prime suspect — and other evidence bolstered that belief. His car matched the description of cars seen in the abductions and a map in his car was folded in a way highlighting Wayne County. Also, Termini kept his firefighter uniform in the car, and police suspected that only an apparent authority figure could have lured the girls into the vehicles without a fight. After talking to investigators, Joyce Walkowicz became convinced that Termini murdered her daughter. But with him dead, and no definitive clues, the case could not be closed. For decades, Termini would stay at the top of the list of possible suspects. Then, in 2007, police would get another chance to test that theory — when they exhumed Termini's corpse. GCRAIG@DemocratandChronicle.com Read or Share this story: http://on.rocne.ws/1QKyHnV

Ripple’s price continues to grow Harry Tucker 28 December 2017 NEWS The company has also announced it will be exploring an entry into the Japanese card payment market. The price of Ripple’s XRP token has been growing, with prices rising more than 30% in the last 24 hours, and more than 450% in the last month, to sit at around $1.80 today. Choose an exchange to buy Ripple On top of the price hikes, SBI Ripple Asia, a joint venture between Ripple and Japanese financial service company SBI Holdings, announced it is creating a consortium to look into the role distributed ledger technologies such as Ripple can play in card payments. The consortium has already developed technology which enables payments through Ripple using phone numbers or QR codes. Why has Ripple’s price gone up so fast? Ripple was one of the only major cryptocurrencies to not take a big hit over the Christmas period, quadrupling the week before 22 December while the likes of BTC and ETH were dropping up to 30%. It’s believed a lot of this is due to its popularity in Asia, as shown above with its SBI Ripple Asia venture. This venture has been responsible for several big partnerships in the region, with over 75 companies now supporting the technology. In the USA, it also announced in late November a partnership with American Express, opening up American Express’s business customers to route payments through Ripple’s blockchain network. Ripple also announced XRP will be used with American Express to speed up payments “later on”. These types of partnerships have also given a legitimacy to Ripple, tying the value of the XRP token to Ripple’s performance as a company, rather than others such as bitcoin which is based on pure speculation. It has also been heavily rumoured that XRP will soon be supported by Coinbase. The popular trading platform has been labelled as a king maker in the cryptocurrency space due to its reach and ease of use for buyers and sellers. The platform is adding over 100,000 new users a day and is the most downloaded app on the iOS App Store in many countries globally, including the USA. Today’s Ripple price 1 AUD - Australia CAD - Canada MXN - Mexico NZD - New Zealand GBP - United Kingdom USD - United States EUR - Euro XCD - East Caribbean Dollar XOF - CFA Franc BCEAO XPF - CFP Franc XAF - CFA Franc BEAC AFA - Afghanistan ALL - Albania DZD - Algeria AOA - Angola XCD - Anguilla XCD - Antigua And Barbuda ARS - Argentina AMD - Armenia AWG - Aruba EUR - Austria AZN - Azerbaijan BSD - Bahamas BHD - Bahrain BDT - Bangladesh BBD - Barbados BYN - Belarus BYR - Belarus EUR - Belgium BZD - Belize XOF - Benin BMD - Bermuda INR - Bhutan BTN - Bhutan BOB - Bolivia BOV - Bolivia BAM - Bosnia And Herzegovina BWP - Botswana BRL - Brazil BND - Brunei Darussalam BGN - Bulgaria XOF - Burkina Faso BIF - Burundi KHR - Cambodia XAF - Cameroon KYD - Cayman Islands XAF - Central African Republic XAF - Chad CLP - Chile CLF - Chile CNY - China AUD - Cocos (Keeling) Islands COP - Colombia COU - Colombia XAF - Congo NZD - Cook Islands CRC - Costa Rica HRK - Croatia CUP - Cuba EUR - Cyprus CZK - 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Somalia ZAR - South Africa KRW - South Korea SSP - South Sudan EUR - Spain LKR - Sri Lanka SRD - Suriname NOK - Svalbard And Jan Mayen SZL - Swaziland SEK - Sweden CHF - Switzerland CHE - Switzerland CHW - Switzerland SYP - Syria TWD - Taiwan TJS - Tajikistan THB - Thailand USD - Timor-Leste XOF - Togo NZD - Tokelau TOP - Tonga TTD - Trinidad And Tobago TND - Tunisia TRY - Turkey TMT - Turkmenistan USD - Turks And Caicos Islands AUD - Tuvalu UGX - Uganda UAH - Ukraine AED - United Arab Emirates TZS - United Republic Of Tanzania UYU - Uruguay UYI - Uruguay UZS - Uzbekistan VUV - Vanuatu VEF - Venezuela VND - Viet Nam USD - Virgin Islands (British) USD - Virgin Islands (U.S.) YER - Yemen ZMW - Zambia BTC - bitcoin BTS - BitShares DASH - Dash DOGE - DogeCoin EAC - EarthCoin EMC - Emercoin ETH - Ethereum FCT - Factom FTC - Feathercoin LD - Linden Dollar LTC - LiteCoin NMC - Namecoin NVC - NovaCoin NXT - Nxt PPC - Peercoin STR - Stellar VTC - VertCoin XMR - Monero XPM - Primecoin XRP - Ripple 0 AUD - Australia CAD - Canada MXN - Mexico NZD - New Zealand GBP - United Kingdom USD - United States EUR - Euro XCD - East Caribbean Dollar XOF - CFA Franc BCEAO XPF - CFP Franc XAF - CFA Franc BEAC AFA - Afghanistan ALL - Albania DZD - Algeria AOA - Angola XCD - Anguilla XCD - Antigua And Barbuda ARS - Argentina AMD - Armenia AWG - Aruba EUR - Austria AZN - Azerbaijan BSD - Bahamas BHD - Bahrain BDT - Bangladesh BBD - Barbados BYN - Belarus BYR - Belarus EUR - Belgium BZD - Belize XOF - Benin BMD - Bermuda INR - Bhutan BTN - Bhutan BOB - Bolivia BOV - Bolivia BAM - Bosnia And Herzegovina BWP - Botswana BRL - Brazil BND - Brunei Darussalam BGN - Bulgaria XOF - Burkina Faso BIF - Burundi KHR - Cambodia XAF - Cameroon KYD - Cayman Islands XAF - Central African Republic XAF - Chad CLP - Chile CLF - Chile CNY - China AUD - Cocos (Keeling) Islands COP - Colombia COU - Colombia XAF - Congo NZD - Cook Islands CRC - Costa Rica HRK - Croatia CUP - Cuba EUR - Cyprus CZK - Czech Republic DKK - Denmark DJF - Djibouti XCD - Dominica DOP - Dominican Republic USD - Ecuador EGP - Egypt SVC - El Salvador USD - El Salvador XAF - Equatorial Guinea ERN - Eritrea EUR - Estonia ETB - Ethiopia FJD - Fiji EUR - Finland EUR - France EUR - French Guiana XPF - French Polynesia EUR - French Southern Territories XAF - Gabon GMD - Gambia GEL - Georgia EUR - Germany GHS - Ghana GIP - Gibraltar EUR - Greece DKK - Greenland XCD - Grenada EUR - Guadeloupe USD - Guam GTQ - Guatemala GNF - Guinea XOF - Guinea-Bissau GYD - Guyana HTG - Haiti USD - Haiti HNL - Honduras HKD - Hong Kong HUF - Hungary ISK - Iceland INR - India IDR - Indonesia EUR - Ireland ILS - Israel EUR - Italy JMD - Jamaica JPY - Japan JOD - Jordan KZT - Kazakhstan KES - Kenya AUD - Kiribati KWD - Kuwait KGS - Kyrgyzstan LAK - Laos EUR - Latvia LBP - Lebanon LRD - Liberia LYD - Libya CHF - Liechtenstein EUR - Lithuania EUR - Luxembourg MOP - Macao MKD - Macedonia MGA - Madagascar MWK - Malawi MYR - Malaysia MVR - Maldives XOF - Mali EUR - Malta USD - Marshall Islands EUR - Martinique MRO - Mauritania MUR - Mauritius MMK - Myanmar EUR - Mayotte MDL - Moldova EUR - Monaco MNT - Mongolia EUR - Montenegro XCD - Montserrat MAD - Morocco MZN - Mozambique NAD - Namibia ZAR - Namibia AUD - Nauru NPR - Nepal EUR - Netherlands XPF - New Caledonia NIO - Nicaragua XOF - Niger NGN - Nigeria NZD - Niue AUD - Norfolk Island USD - Northern Mariana Islands NOK - Norway OMR - Oman PKR - Pakistan USD - Palau PAB - Panama USD - Panama PGK - Papua New Guinea PYG - Paraguay PEN - Peru PHP - Philippines NZD - Pitcairn PLN - Poland EUR - Portugal USD - Puerto Rico QAR - Qatar RON - Romania RUB - Russian Federation RWF - Rwanda XCD - Saint Kitts And Nevis XCD - Saint Lucia EUR - Saint Pierre And Miquelon XCD - Saint Vincent And The Grenadines WST - Samoa STD - Sao Tome And Principe SAR - Saudi Arabia XOF - Senegal RSD - Serbia SCR - Seychelles SLL - Sierra Leone SGD - Singapore EUR - Slovakia EUR - Slovenia SBD - Solomon Islands SOS - Somalia ZAR - South Africa KRW - South Korea SSP - South Sudan EUR - Spain LKR - Sri Lanka SRD - Suriname NOK - Svalbard And Jan Mayen SZL - Swaziland SEK - Sweden CHF - Switzerland CHE - Switzerland CHW - Switzerland SYP - Syria TWD - Taiwan TJS - Tajikistan THB - Thailand USD - Timor-Leste XOF - Togo NZD - Tokelau TOP - Tonga TTD - Trinidad And Tobago TND - Tunisia TRY - Turkey TMT - Turkmenistan USD - Turks And Caicos Islands AUD - Tuvalu UGX - Uganda UAH - Ukraine AED - United Arab Emirates TZS - United Republic Of Tanzania UYU - Uruguay UYI - Uruguay UZS - Uzbekistan VUV - Vanuatu VEF - Venezuela VND - Viet Nam USD - Virgin Islands (British) USD - Virgin Islands (U.S.) YER - Yemen ZMW - Zambia BTC - bitcoin BTS - BitShares DASH - Dash DOGE - DogeCoin EAC - EarthCoin EMC - Emercoin ETH - Ethereum FCT - Factom FTC - Feathercoin LD - Linden Dollar LTC - LiteCoin NMC - Namecoin NVC - NovaCoin NXT - Nxt PPC - Peercoin STR - Stellar VTC - VertCoin XMR - Monero XPM - Primecoin XRP - Ripple 7 days 14 days 31 days What are Ripple and XRP? Ripple itself is the San Francisco-based company behind the XRP token and is essentially a fast money transfer network using blockchain technology. Ripple’s goal is to be a global settlement network which will eventually allow anyone to transfer money from any currency to any currency in seconds. Currently, when you transfer money to another currency, that money needs to go through an exchange which can often take days and can be quite costly. Ripple’s solution to this is to use its XRP token as a sort of global underlying currency. Currencies transferred over the Ripple network are converted into XRP before being converted into the currency the sender is looking to move to. Transfers over Ripple take a maximum of four seconds, with much lower transaction fees than traditional exchanges. Unlike bitcoin, Ripple’s XRP tokens aren’t received by mining, with all 100 billion XRP all existing on the platform already but not all are on the market yet. To avoid flooding the market and reducing coin price, Ripple releases around 1 billion XRP every month. The company also hopes by doing this it will create a similar effect to XRP price that mining has had on bitcoin and other similar currencies.

On Thursday, despite veto threats from the Obama White House, the House passed the American Security Against Foreign Enemies (SAFE) Act with an overwhelming bipartisan majority. How overwhelming? It was veto-proof, with 47 Democrats joining Republicans to increase the screening and approval process of Syrian refugees entering the country. Over 2,000 have been admitted so far. The Obama administration announced they would accept 10,000 Syrian refugees, despite security concerns. Those glaring national security issues came front and center after the horrific ISIS-led terrorist attack in Paris last Friday. One of the suicide bombers had a Syrian passport, which was recovered by French authorities. The bomber had entered Europe through Greece posing as a refugee. So, what’s so horrific about the SAFE Act (via GovTrack.us): H.R. 4038 [SAFE ACT] would expand the screening process for those refugees attempting to enter the United States by requiring the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to conduct its own background checks in addition to the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS). Any refugee would be prohibited from entry until the FBI certifies that they pose no security threat. Refugees would only be admitted with the unanimous agreement of the FBI, DHS, and Director of National Intelligence. If you couldn’t find anything controversial about this, you’re normal. And many Democrats viewed this as a reasonable piece of legislation. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough met with House Democrats before the vote, where their presentation on why they shouldn’t support the SAFE Act was pilloried as “too complicated,” or inarticulate at best. One Democrat, who wished to remain anonymous, went into a caucus briefing opposed to the bill, but left supporting it–adding that the White House “royally f**ked” up their whole strategy in fighting this bill (via Huffington Post): In several meetings, Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) presented fellow Democrats with polling data showing that lawmakers who didn't support tighter restrictions would be in the sharp minority. As former head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Israel is often called on to give advice on electoral matters. And while he didn't explicitly encourage members to vote for the SAFE Act, the implication was clear: you will be vulnerable if you don't support the only piece of refugee-related legislation that has gotten a vote after the Paris attacks. […] Far more consequential, aides say, was the failure of the Obama administration to make the case that the SAFE Act was either excessive or unnecessary. Israel said as much himself after leaving a Democratic caucus briefing on Thursday with White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough and Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson. "I've seen better presentations in my time here," Israel told reporters. "They may have strong arguments on their side, but they're not expressing those strong arguments sufficiently." An aide in the meeting with Johnson and McDonough said the administration’s presentation was “too complicated” and was “not going over well.” Another aide said they didn't answer basic questions presented by lawmakers, such as why it was not practical or doable to add another level of certification on top of the current vetting process. One House Democrat, who requested anonymity, said he went into the meeting with administration officials opposed to the bill but left in support of it. "If the White House hadn't royally f**ked this up they'd have lost maybe 20 Democrats," said the lawmaker. (He ultimately voted against the bill.) As Guy wrote, Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) has already promised this bill will die in the upper chamber, but that doesn’t mean this issue is going away. Congress needs to pass another spending bill by December 11 to keep the government running. We could be seeing another act of Shutdown Theater, but this time there are no adversaries (via Vox): Even if Senate Democrats hold the line against a veto override, that won't permanently solve the problem. It's looking extremely likely that congressional Republicans will demand changes to Syrian refugee policy as a condition for keeping the government open past December 11. And unlike past shutdown threats, this is one congressional Democrats might actually go along with. For congressional Republicans, this bill is a brilliant strategic move. It's anodyne enough that it's attracted broad support from congressional Democrats as well as Republicans. And it's forced the Obama administration — which has never had good relationships with Democrats on Capitol Hill — to fight an uphill battle. As reported before numerous times, the FBI has admitted that there is no way they can screen every Syrian refugee. This isn’t an issue to be taken lightly; we should have a serious debate about how to screen these refugees and prevent those who wish to execute a terrorist attack on American soil from entering. Rep. Israel is right regarding the political fallout from this issue. Now is not the time for Democrats to look weak on national security issues, since they’ve been a little light in this area since 1972. The American people are against Obama's refugee policy, barely 30 percent support it. The president has mocked Republicans for their position on this crisis that is embraced by voters, along with a substantial amount of members from his own party. Either the president thinks he’s right and we’re all wrong, which isn’t out of the realm of possibility due to his arrogance, or he just doesn’t care. He’s a lame duck. He is, as Allahpundit prolifically says often, a “semi-retired president.” Then again, we’ll see how this goes. For now, Reid seems confident that there are enough Senate Democrats to prevent cloture. But if Speaker Ryan decides to tie the December 11 spending bill to refugee funding, which he said is on the table, it should be interesting to see how long Reid’s stranglehold grip on his caucus lasts, especially when these issues played a role in defeating Democrats in some of the 2014 races–namely Sen. Kay Hagan in North Carolina. It has the potential of making Virginia more of a battleground state, given that Arlington County has signaled they’re willing to open the floodgates. We shouldn’t be shocked if this “I don’t care, I do what I want” attitude persists on this issue within the Obama administration, who didn’t really mind that Democrats were being utterly decimated at the state level since 2009. As for Reid, well, he’s on his way out as well, so his “bull in a china closet” antics are expected as well. Moreover, is there any other attitude to be taken when you do royally mess up on an issue like this? Just wait for the reaction of this bill ever reaches the president's desk for his signature. Last Note: Read Justin's post about five Syrians arrested in Honduras with stolen passports destined for the U.S.

If an adult person is not mentally ill and not mentally disabled, then he/she will answer YES to the following questions: 1. Do children sometimes lie? 2. Do teenagers sometimes lie? 3. Do college students and young adults sometimes lie? 4. Do adults sometimes lie? It take it to be UNCONTROVERSIAL that children, teenagers, young adults, and adults sometimes tell lies. There might be some who disagree about the claim that VERY YOUNG children tell lies (i.e. children who are only two or three years old), but my previous post in this series provides significant evidence to support this answer: YES, even VERY YOUNG children will sometimes lie. So, if we all agree that children, teenagers, young adults, and adults sometimes lie, then why am I writing posts on this question? Because the real question is not whether people of various age groups SOMETIMES lie; rather, the real questions are these: How MANY people lie and deceive? How OFTEN do people lie and deceive? How EASILY do people lie and deceive? What MOTIVATES people to lie and deceive? How GOOD are people at lying and deceiving? My main point is that MOST children lie, MOST teenagers lie, MOST young adults lie, and that MOST older adults lie. Another point I want to make is that children OFTEN lie, teenagers OFTEN lie, young adults OFTEN lie, and older adults OFTEN lie. Scientific research can confirm or disconfirm these claims, and scientific research can inform us of the DEGREE to which lying and deception are common human behaviors. The MORE people that lie, the more skeptical we ought to be. The more OFTEN people lie, the more skeptical we ought to be. The more EASILY people will tell lies, the more skeptical we ought to be, and so forth. The scientific study that I focused in on in the my previous post examined the behavior of VERY YOUNG children. The results of that study show that children as young as two years old will tell lies. In fact, between 25% and 33% of the younger children who ‘transgressed’ by disobeying the rule to not peek (at a toy placed behind them) before being asked to guess what sort of toy it was (based on sounds coming from the toy) lied and said that they had not peeked. The children who were about three years old in that study who ‘transgressed’ lied at a significantly higher rate. Sixteen of the oldest children in this study were from 43 to 48 months old (3.6 to 4 years old). Ten of those children peeked at the toy, and nine of the ten who peeked lied, that is, 90% of the children who peeked in this older group lied about it! But what about older children, children from ages four to ten? Perhaps as children grow up, they become more aware of the wrongness of lying and deception, and more aware of social conventions against lying and deception, and more aware of the implications and consequences of lying and deception. So, it is possible that lying and deception decline as children get older and become more mature. We need to turn to scientific research to find out whether the strong tendency to lie at around three years of age declines, or increases, or stays the same, over the following years of childhood (i.e. from age four to age ten). Kang Lee, who was one of the psychological researchers who authored the article that I discussed in the previous post, has done a lot of research on lying and cheating and truth-telling by children. One article, in particular, discusses research in recent decades about children lying [emphasis added]: ====================== Child Development Perspectives © 2013 The Society for Research in Child Development Volume 7, Number 2, 2013, Pages 91–96 Little Liars: Development of Verbal Deception in Children Kang Lee University of Toronto ABSTRACT— Lying is common among adults and a more complex issue in children. In this article, I review two decades of empirical evidence about lying in children from the perspective of speech act theory. Children begin to tell lies in the preschool years for anti- and prosocial purposes, and their tendency to lie changes as a function of age and the type of lies being told. In addition, children’s ability to tell convincing lies improves with age. In the article, I highlight the central roles that children’s understanding of mental states and social conventions play in the development of lying. I also identify areas for research to be done to develop a more comprehensive picture of the typical and atypical developmental courses of verbal deception in children. ====================== In the introduction of this article, Lee notes that “No research on lying was conducted between the early 1900s and 1980 (Lewis, Stanger, & Sullivan, 1989).” But this changed in recent decades [emphasis added]: ======================= Since the late 1980s, research on lying in children has increased, mainly due to three advancements in developmental psychology. One was research on children’s theory of mind (ToM), or the notion that individuals have intentions, desires, and beliefs, and will act accordingly (Wellman, 1992). Lying in essence is ToM in action, because to lie and to lie successfully, individuals must understand their mental state and their listener’s mental state. The second advancement was the increased recognition that culture-specific social conventions play an important role in the development of moral reasoning and behavior (Turiel, 1983). Lying, like any other moral or immoral behavior, increasingly is thought to be influenced not only by universal moral principles but by social conventions (Lee, 2000). The third advancement was the rapid rise in research on eyewitness testimony by children (Goodman, 2006) as a result of an increase in the number of legal cases involving children (Lyon & Dorado, 2008). ============================== In the article, Lee synthesizes data from several psychological experiments and provides a chart that indicates the percent of ‘transgressors’ or children who do something contrary to directions given by an adult and who then lie and indicate that they did not disobey the directions given by an adult: =============================== ========================== We can see that there is a significant increase in the percent of children who lie about their violation of the rule or instruction given by an adult. At age two only about 30% of ‘transgressors’ lie. At age three it jumps up to about 55%, and by age four about 75% of transgressors will lie. Then there is a smaller increase between age four and five, so that at five about 80% of transgressors lie. Then the trajectory levels out, and stays in the range between 80% and 85% for ages six through ten. These empirical studies of lying indicate that MOST children who are three years of age or older will lie when they have broken a rule or disobeyed direction given by an adult. Furthermore, this tendency to lie increases significantly between age two and age five, and then levels out at a high percentage (between 80% and 85% of transgressors will lie), from age five to age ten. So, we do NOT see the tendency to lie DECREASING as children grow older. Rather, it appears that the tendency INCREASES as they learn how to become better at the ‘skill’ of lying and deceiving others. By age five children become fairly skilled at lying and will very frequently lie, at least when they have disobeyed a rule or directions from an adult (‘transgression’), and they will lie even when there is no threat of punishment or no significant reward at stake (which is the case in these experiments).

A newspaper story out of liberated France tells of a brave campaign by feminists to coincide with the gift-giving season, and beautifully illustrates the sensitivity and devotion of truly dedicated social justice progressives. That country’s feminist domestic legion — just to dissociate it from the more famous and, just possibly, even braver French Foreign Legion — has executed a brutally stupid nuisance campaign of inserting tiny leaflets into various Christmas toys imprinted with the harsh declarative, “This toy is sexist.” Sound the Dies Irae. They do so, they are pleased to claim, to alert little boy kiddies when they get a train set, or little girl kiddies when they get a nurse doll, that they are being abused; that they are being shouldered into “stereotypes”; and that Santa (their parents) is confirming all the known “gender biases.” Finally — this is really good — their fortune-cookie sabotage is meant “to raise awareness … that toymakers and sellers play a part in the fact that not a single little girl asks Father Christmas for a sword.” (Absolutely my italics.) Well, if there is a cause I want to join, endorse and publicize it is surely the impoverishment of a world where little girls don’t have, by right, cutlasses and rapiers, samurai steel and Toledo blades, with which to terrorize the domestic hearth and practice parry and thrust, hack and pierce, on the Christmas turkey — or more likely their weaponless male siblings. (“Now, Ashleigh, put away the battle-axe and eat your peas.”) I’m sure there are many young women out there who grew up “swordless” — need I say that in these enlightened times I am not implying anything Freudian here — and will, consequently, live impaired and unfulfilled lives. Is this the feminism of 2014, flocks of feminists going undercover into the Toys R Us stores, foisting micro-propaganda into tiny toddlers tea sets and light sabres? The story is an outlier, some might say — but the some would be very wrong. In an era when college students under the mighty sway of heteronormative patriarchy have conjured up the concept of “micro-aggression” and stamped their books with “trigger warnings,” there is surely nothing too silly, too intellectually vacuous, for educated feminists to embrace. Witness that most risible spectacle of Beyoncé — the Chanticleer of Bootylicious — giving a performance at the TV Music Awards that would have the most talented stripper envious of its lavish lasciviousness, assuming poses that would embarrass the most veteran proctologist, while on a backdrop, in bright lights and huge lettering the word “FEMINIST” flashed to the world how “empowering” the louche lewd and lecherous exhibition really was. This is the same year when the Grand Twerker, Miley Cyrus, declared “she is one of the world’s biggest feminists.” And of course it is also the year when the currently green-haired queen of confessional feminism, Lena Dunham, drenched the market with her formidable musings under the title of Not That Kind of Girl, a biography memoir in the great tradition of Pamela Anderson and other literary ecdysiasts, which included a story of her being “raped” by a “mustachioed campus Republican named Barry” at her intellectual nursery, Oberlin college. Am I “mansplaining” here? I surely hope so Random House has since had to apologize to an well-known Oberlin conservative named Barry who threatened to sue. Dunham made the name up — she is a self-confessed “unreliable narrator.” The whole mess is a chaff harvest of folly and self-promotion — all in all, a triumph for “narrative” biography and a summit moment for the whole “always believe the victim” commandment of feminist catechism. Perhaps a tiny warning leaflet in Not That Kind of Girl — “this is probably fiction” — would help. Am I “mansplaining” here? I surely hope so. Mansplaining is a bit of this year’s wombspeak, a coinage of great self-satisfaction and smugness which attempts to put down reconciling reality to facts, naming fables when they are fables, and contesting any of the dogmas of the enlightened sisterhood, as mere condescension from the other gender. It should be paired with “femsplaining” which is of course pure unshampooed truth — as determined, of course, by when and if it works for the cause. All this is quite wonderful stuff. From Toys ‘R Us to Lena and Miley, these stories have served as admirable distractions from the trivialities of Boko Haram, the kidnapping and sale of young girls by demented fanatics, the horrid acid attacks on school girls from the frothing Taliban and their ilk, and the sundry brutalities and mass rapes by the world’s real women haters. For as long as there is a swordless Sally, the feminists of the West have their own problems. But equally, as long as there is a Beyoncé and her bounteous bouncing booty, there is yet hope for us all, and redemption but a bump and a grind away. You go, girl. National Post

A Cherokee County man was indicted on child molestation and statutory rape charges Thursday, officials said. Halario Matias Perez of Canton was originally charged only with statutory rape when deputies said they found him having sex with a 15-year-old girl in a parked car about 8:30 a.m. on June 19, according to the arrest report. The child molestation charge was added after deputies learned Perez was 21 years old, Cherokee County sheriff’s Cpl. Christopher Bryant said. A resident who lived on the dead-end road where Perez parked called 911 and reported a Ford Mustang had been near her gate for an extended period of time, deputies said. Bryant wrote that he found the couple in the obvious act of intercourse. Perez said he knew the girl from a church they attended and admitted he knew she was 15, Bryant wrote in the report, but Perez lied and said he was 18. When Bryant told Perez he was under arrest on a statutory rape charge, “Hilario became extremely emotional, stating he had made a mistake,” Bryant wrote, “going so far as to throw himself at my feet and begin praying and begging for mercy while grabbing at my boots.” Though the teenage girl told Bryant she consented to sex, Bryant explained to her that she was not legally able to consent, the report states. While Perez was given bond on the molestation and rape charges, he is being held in the Cherokee County Adult Detention Center without bond on an immigration hold, the sheriff’s office said. Know what’s really going on with crime and public safety in your metro Atlanta community, including breaking news, trial coverage, trends and the latest on unsolved cases. Sign up for the AJC’s crime and safety newsletter delivered weekly to your inbox. In other news:

Capitol Hill image via kptripathi/flickr. Creative Commons 2.0 license. Adapted and expanded from a presentation on "Energy Independence and Foreign Policy" to the World Affairs Council of Oregon, 3/28/14. BACKGROUND The roots of energy independence lie in the energy crises of the 1970s. US oil production peaked in 1970, and we became increasingly dependent on oil imported from the Middle East. In response to US support for Israel, OPEC cut production and doubled prices in 1973 and again in 1979. The economy stagnated for most of the decade, and Americans recoiled at the thought of the economy and foreign policy being held hostage by Arab sheiks. Independence from these threats then became a key national objective. An effort was made to increase domestic exploration, develop alternative fuels, and conserve energy. Automobile gas mileage standards were increased, natural gas displaced oil in industry and home heating, and the generation of electricity from oil was phased out. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve was put in place as a buffer against supply disruptions, and the Carter Doctrine in the wake of the Iranian Revolution in 1979 declared that any threat in the Persian Gulf would be treated as an assault on the vital interests of the United States. New discoveries in the North Slope of Alaska, the North Sea, and elsewhere in the late ‘70s took the steam out of OPEC. Within a few years oil prices returned to previous levels and our economy prospered. The pursuit of renewable energy was abandoned, a victim of declining energy prices. In the 2000s conventional world crude oil supply stopped growing, and oil prices climbed steadily from $20 a barrel to more than $100. In response, horizontal drilling and fracking opened up hard-to-produce reserves from tight oil formations in North Dakota and elsewhere, reversing the 40-year decline in domestic production. Domestic oil production has increased from 5 mbd in 2008 to about 7.5 mbd in 2013. Similarly, natural gas production has increased by 20-30 percent over the same time. Projecting this trend forward, some say the US will soon become the largest energy producer in the world, surpassing Russia and Saudi Arabia, and that we will soon be a net exporter. In addition there are proposals to build the Keystone XL pipeline to move oil from the Canadian tar sands to Gulf Coast refineries, build coal export facilities, and lift the oil export ban after 40 years. Looking further ahead, the International Energy Agency and BP project the US energy independence by 2035. As in the 1970s, the purported benefits of energy independence are simple: an improved economy due to the reduced outflow of dollars, improved national security, and more flexibility on foreign policy, particularly with regards to the Middle East and now Russia. Those objectives are substantial, if they can be achieved. However, drilling and mining our way to energy independence is a mirage. First, it may provide temporary economic gain, but will not cure our fundamental economic problems. Second, it will have very limited benefits for foreign policy and national security; the problem is not US dependence, but rather the dependence of our allies and trading partners. Third, it is simply unachievable. And last, it ignores carbon emissions; the real goal should be independence from carbon-based energy sources. ECONOMY Let’s look at the economy first. We currently import about 8 million barrels of oil per day, more than 40% of the oil we use. We pay about $1 billion a day for that oil, or $350-$400 billion per year. That represents more than half of our current accounts deficit. Increased domestic production reduces our current accounts deficit and should help strengthen the dollar. This is a real and substantial benefit, though not enough to turn around our economy by itself. The RAND Corporation estimates that about 15% of our military budget—$83 billion of a total $518 billion—goes to protect access to oil in the Middle East. Would energy independence free us of that responsibility? Because of the quantity of oil in question and the dependence of our major allies, it’s likely that would maintain a strong presence there even if we were “energy independent.” There likely will be savings here, but probably not as much as one would hope. Some sources believe that energy independence will mean lower prices for consumers. However, any increased domestic production will come from unconventional sources, such as shale oil or tar sands, which are more expensive than conventional oil. It only became economic to produce because of high world oil prices over the last several years. In addition, oil prices are tied to the world price of oil. Energy independence will not reduce consumer prices. Most importantly, conventional world crude oil production has peaked, affecting the ability to grow the economy. This paradigm shift contributed to the fiscal crisis of 2008 and has dampened attempts to pull out of it. Unconventional oil is too expensive and its flow rates are too low to replace conventional oil or rejuvenate economic growth. No monetary or fiscal policies will reverse or overcome this fundamental choke on the global economy. The age of rapid growth is over. We are entering an era of slow or no growth. Increased domestic oil production may help to stabilize the economy, or perhaps even to continue to grow it, albeit at a slower rate than in the past. But drilling or fracking our way to energy independence, while it may provide a temporary shot-in-the-arm, is not sustainable for long. Oil is a limited resource, and costs will only increase – either of which will prevent it from being our economic salvation. While energy certainly affects the economy (energy costs above about 6 percent of GDP have been associated with economic recessions), it is not the only factor. Thomas Friedman’s book That Used To Be Us lists five pillars of prosperity going forward: education, infrastructure, immigration policy, government-funded R&D (which includes renewable energy), and financial regulation. Others have suggested additional or different factors. We have more to gain by investing in these issues rather than throwing more money into growing domestic oil production from finite and increasingly expensive unconventional sources. The latter is just throwing money down a rat hole. FOREIGN POLICY AND NATIONAL SECURITY US solider in Iraq image via mnfiraq/flickr. Creative Commons 2.0 license. Next, let’s look at foreign policy and national security. The argument is that energy independence will ensure that our national security is not jeopardized by oil price or supply problems emanating from abroad. It will also allow us more flexibility in foreign policy, especially in the Middle East. OPEC hasn’t used oil as a political weapon in 35 years. They apparently recognize that embargoes and price spikes hurt them as well as importing nations. That’s not to say something couldn’t happen. The Gulf monarchies are aging and autocratic, and face upheaval sooner or later. If they are replaced by anti-Western radicals, world oil security will be destabilized and/or threatened. However, this is a danger to the world, not just to the US. We prop up the Gulf monarchies. That may be distasteful, and one may wish it weren’t so. But if we withdrew, the alternative could easily be worse – not only for western energy security, but for terrorism, peace and stability around the region and beyond, and perhaps even for the prosperity of the region and hopes for democracy. It’s a case of damned if we do, damned if we don’t. Second, the U.S. is relatively energy independent already. We are self-sufficient in coal and mostly self-sufficient in natural gas (we import about 15 percent of our natural gas from Canada). We do import about half of our oil – but our major suppliers are Canada and Mexico. Only a small portion is from the Middle East. Europe and Japan are much more dependent on imports from Russia and the Middle East than the US is. Their security and prosperity likely would affect US interests more than any energy-related actions directed against us. But increased US oil production will not be enough to make ourselves energy independent, much less our allies. If we achieve energy independence and our partners and allies don’t, we are still vulnerable – both economically and in terms of national security and foreign policy. Third, would energy independence give the U.S. more latitude on foreign policy? Let’s look at some specific cases. · What about Syria? A major drought in 2006-2011 created food shortages and drove a million Syrians into neighboring areas. Sectarian tensions and the hope of the Arab Spring then lit this tinder. Syria has been mentioned as a possible route for a pipeline to move natural gas from Qatar to Europe as an alternative to Russian natural gas. That may have attracted some western interest, and it is possible that European dependence on oil and natural gas from Russia may have muted the West’s response. However, one of the US’ main interests presumably is to break Syria’s political alignment with Russia and Iran in hopes of alleviating its border dispute with Israel and the transport of weapons through Syria to Hezbollah. US energy independence wouldn’t make a fundamental difference, though European energy independence may have given them a chance to exert more influence. · Egypt? One of the causes of the Egyptian uprising in 2011 was the loss of revenue as declining Egyptian oil production drove them to become a net oil importer. This caused food and gasoline subsidies to be cut, leading to steep price rises that people couldn’t afford. Egyptian energy independence would help, but not American energy independence. · Would it help resolve the Iranian nuclear standoff? We have been independent of Iranian oil for 35 years. It was the economic, trade, scientific, and military sanctions that were successful in getting Iran to the negotiating table. US energy independence is irrelevant. · What about 9/11? Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” listed US support for Israel, western interference in Muslim countries, and Western values as the main reasons behind the attack. Energy independence would have made little difference. It’s doubtful that US energy independence wouldhave affected our response in Afghanistan, since that nation possesses little oil. · Energy independence wouldn’t do anything to help resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, since neither side has any oil to use as leverage. · What about Crimea or Ukraine? Russia provides a third of Europe’s oil and gas, so European energy independence might have made Russia think twice – but that’s not in the cards. In addition, Crimea and Ukraine are vital to Russian interests – Crimea is Russia’s only access to a warm sea port, and Ukraine is Russia’s major source of wheat and is a buffer against western encirclement of Russia. What could the West do differently if it were energy independent? Would it really risk military confrontation? Doubtful. Probably sanctions, just like now. European energy independence might make them more willing to endorse stronger sanctions; US energy independence is irrelevant as Russia only exports a small amount of oil to the US (under 4% of US imports and falling). · Sen. Rand Paul’s response to the Crimean crisis would be to drill, drill, drill. Gen. James Jones, former National Security Advisor, says the Keystone XL Pipeline should be approved to signal to Putin that energy security cannot be used as a weapon. Those kinds of responses are pipedreams. The Eurozone imports 9 mbd. No amount of drilling or fracking will make the US energy independent, much less Europe. Meanwhile, the XL pipeline will move only 800,000 barrels of oil per day. These strategies aren’t exactly threats to Russia’s oil and gas exports, or leverage to curtail their ambitions. · The only case where US energy independence might have made a difference was the two Iraq Wars, which were unquestionably about preserving access to the world’s second largest reserves. However, even there, the sheer quantity of oil at stake may have been too tempting to have prevented US intervention. In summary, energy independence would do little to prevent or resolve foreign policy entanglement in the Middle East and elsewhere. In addition, our fate is intertwined with that of Europe, Japan, China and others – as they go, so go we. We have more to gain by modeling behavior and encouraging and assisting others to reduce their use of oil, than by trying to achieve energy independence for ourselves. THE POTENTIAL OF ACHIEVING ENERGY INDEPENDENCE Next, what are the chances of achieving energy independence? Is it even achievable? Energy independence is an illusion. The current US energy boom is unlikely to power a shift from energy scarcity to energy plenty. First, world production of cheap, easy-to-produce conventional crude oil has peaked. It has been on a plateau since 2005, declining slightly. Global production of conventional oil is declining about 6% per year. We need to replace the equivalent of Saudi Arabia’s production every 4 years. The large, easy-to-find deposits are generally discovered first, and we found those more than 50 years ago. The oil we’re finding today is from higher-cost unconventional sources – smaller deposits of lower quality oil in more remote locations and more complex geologic formations. We have to go into coastal waters many thousands of feet deep; or mine tar sands and heat them until the oil flows; or frack shale to liberate the oil and gas; or drill in the Arctic; or grow corn unsustainably to convert into a more-dilute ethanol fuel. Capital expenditures on drilling have doubled since 2000, but oil production has risen barely 15 percent. All of this just to offset declines from conventional fields, which are accelerating. Fracking for light tight oil in North Dakota and elsewhere has increased US production from 5 mbd to about 7.5 mbd in the past five years. But the prospects for increased production from shale oil are limited. Decline rates of shale oil wells are 50% or more in the first year – much steeper than for conventional oil. That means we have to drill at an ever-faster rate just to keep up. And we’re producing the sweet, easy stuff first – it only gets harder. The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) projects shale oil to push domestic oil production another 2 mbd to a high of between 9 and 9.5 mbd by about 2020, declining after that. David Hughes, formerly with Canada’s equivalent of the US Department of Energy and now with Post Carbon Institute, projects shale oil topping off in 2016 at perhaps 1 mbd higher than today – good, but still far from providing us energy independence. Regardless whose estimate you use, the US consumes about 19 mbd of oil. We currently import about 8 mbd. New fuel efficiency standards adopted by the Obama Administration should reduce consumption by about 2 mbd by 2025 and 4 mbd by 2035. However, even under the most optimistic forecast we would still have to import 6-7 mbd, about a third of our needs – and potentially more as population grows. One telling sign about shale oil’s prospects is that the major oil corporations are not heavily involved. The drillers are primarily independent “wildcatters”, who have to finance these expensive projects with debt. If and when production declines, they could go under if they can no longer pay their debts. Peak oil is not some crackpot idea. Peak oil is about flow rates, not how much oil is theoretically left in the ground. The US Joint Forces Command and the German military have issued reports acknowledging peak oil as an imminent threat. Deutsche Bank, Citibank, Swiss Re-Insurance, Merrill Lynch, and Toyota, among others, have also studied the issue and concluded it is real and will affect them. The only question is how steeply conventional oil production will decline and how much it can be offset by unconventional supplies. And while fracking helps domestically, it barely makes a dent in global supplies. US tight oil production and Canadian tar sands will have little or no effect in reversing or delaying global peak oil. The peak of world oil production is intertwined with our current economic malaise. Energy fuels growth, and growth is what makes debt feasible and allows us to pay it off. So when energy production slows, prices rise and the economy slows as well, making it harder to pay debts. Combine the physical limit of stagnant world oil production with bad loans, derivatives, and other complex financial instruments that people didn’t understand, and you get mass default and a system-wide financial crisis. The greatest threat, then, is not American dependence in a world of growing oil supply, but global interdependence in a world of shrinking supply. In the 1970s US oil was in decline, but global supply was still growing. Today, however, global supply has plateaued. Oil available for export is declining even faster as oil producers keep more for their own use. As oil supply tightens, economies will struggle and nations will do what they can to solidify their access to remaining resources. This will cause tensions and create opportunities for conflict. We must do what we can to anticipate these problems and head them off. This may include international diplomacy allocating constrained oil exports in such a manner that would reduce competition and the potential for conflict. We cannot abandon our allies or cede the playing field to the likes of Russia, China, or Iran. What about natural gas? Fracking has increased domestic gas production 25-30 percent in recent years, and long-term supplies are potentially more abundant than oil. Some sources estimate domestic unconventional gas supplies increasing significantly. For example, the IEA’s World Energy Outlook 2012 is able to project US energy independence by 2035 in large part due to an expected major increase in production from unconventional natural gas (fracking). However, decline rates for gas wells are even steeper than oil wells. One-third of gas production needs to be replaced every year. In addition, to help achieve energy independence, natural gas would have to displace imported oil, which is used primarily for transportation. While natural gas can be substituted in vehicles, we would have to double or triple our natural gas production. This is not very likely: our gas supply is not endless, and we’ll be tapping ever smaller and more expensive sources. As with oil, flow rates cannot be sustained. Natural gas may have a niche role to play as a transportation fuel in the short term, but mostly gas from fracking and other unconventional sources will replace declining conventional supplies for existing uses such as home heating and industry, and perhaps to displace coal in electric power generation. There is not enough, and we cannot produce it fast enough, to do everything we would like it to do. Alternatively, some sources believe the export of liquefied natural gas (LNG) is in our future. In that case, LNG exports could offset oil imports and potentially make us energy independent on a net basis (i.e., disregarding the different uses of natural gas and oil). However, that would not necessarily reduce our vulnerability associated with imported oil, depending on the source of the oil. In addition, because of the uncertainty of supplies, infrastructure needs, assured markets, and environmental issues with fracking, the siting of LNG terminals, and the movement of LNG, LNG at best must be considered a long shot. In summary, fracking for oil and natural gas will not make us energy independent. It will have modest economic benefits but won’t materially improve national security or flexibility our foreign policy. Both our economy and national security will still be interdependent with that of Europe, Japan, and other allies and partners, regardless how energy independent we are. ENERGY INDEPENDENCE VIA RENEWABLES Renewable energy is the other path to energy independence. Would renewables fare any better than fracking? In terms of foreign policy, it would be about the same as described above for unconventional oil – it wouldn’t have much effect unless all our trading partners and allies were energy independent also. Economically, renewable energy – like fracking – would keep dollars at home. In addition, like fracking, it wouldn’t be any cheaper for consumers – renewables tend to be dispersed resources that are relatively expensive to harness and consolidate into useful packets of energy. However, renewable energy would have several other benefits. First, unlike fracking, it does hold the potential for energy independence in the long-term. Second, costs will only go down, whereas the cost of unconventional fuels will increase. Third, it creates a new growth industry for the long term, with local jobs as well as export opportunities. And fourth, it reduces carbon emissions instead of aggravating the problem. However, renewables won’t get us to energy independence any time soon. It will take several decades to build them out, and we’re not exactly off to a fast start. It will require the effort equivalent to that of World War II, but sustained for the next 35 years rather than five years. In addition, renewables primarily provide electricity and direct heat. They do not directly displace liquid fuels for transportation, which is precisely what imported oil provides. And anyone who thinks biofuels will ever be more than a niche fuel, much less scale up to displace imported oil, better get a reality check. We need to re-invent a transportation infrastructure and technologies that begin to move us away from oil. CLIMATE Of course, there is one other “greatest threat” that happens to be deeply intertwined with oil: climate change. Carbon emissions are the 10 billion ton gorilla in the room that nobody is doing anything serious about. A big downside of increased domestic oil production is that it siphons investment away from development of renewable energy sources, and it increases greenhouse gas emissions. And even if we achieved enough efficiency and renewables to eliminate imports and become energy independent, it would still leave the issue of carbon emissions. More than energy independence, we need to strive for carbon independence. If we don’t begin to deal with climate change now, it will eventually overwhelm our other foreign policy issues. Without international action to mitigate and adapt to climate change, we face a very disturbing future. Climate change is already driving conflict, migration, and failed states. In both Darfur and Syria, long-term drought drove refugees in search of productive land and into conflict with neighboring populations. The increasing strength of hurricanes, triggered by more heat in ocean waters, has driven millions from their homes in the Philippines, Pakistan, and Central America. Where will climate refugees go? And what problems will that cause around the world – socially, economically, politically, and militarily? Nor is the developed world immune. Drought and fires in Russia and Australia significantly cut wheat production. Here at home, cities from New Orleans to New York City have sustained major blows from extreme weather, and California and other parts of the US are enduring severe to extreme drought. After recent storms in the UK, the unmentionable subject of triaging coastal areas and putting efforts into protecting London has surfaced. In the long run, carbon independence will be good not just for the US but for everyone. The countries that lead the way will be the moral, economic, and political powers of the nascent solar age – that is, if we can get there before we fry ourselves and while we still have the energy and financial resources to bootstrap the transition. We need international agreement on how to reduce carbon emissions, and how to allocate the cuts among the developed, developing, and undeveloped nations. Since a process is already in place for this discussion, it should subsume my recommendation for international discussions on how to allocate declining world oil supplies – even though it has yet to yield much fruit. But someone needs to lead. Presumably that would be the world’s leader, which is still the U.S., tarnished as we have become. Rather than opposing action, we should be driving negotiations, encouraging and assisting others, and leading by example. In fact, a prerequisite to international leadership is having a strong domestic policy. Under the principle of first doing no additional harm, two of the biggest things we can do to move toward carbon independence are to stop the Keystone XL pipeline and the coal export terminals proposed on the West Coast. This would not only sequester some large and dirty carbon resources – it would set us on the path and send a signal that we are prepared to lead and to take the hard steps necessary to reduce emissions. Other priorities should be shutting down all existing coal-fired power plants, and then figuring out how to transition from oil-based transportation to whatever comes next. Ultimately transportation probably needs to go electric, which can be derived from renewable resources. But it will mean a makeover of our infrastructure, from urban design and manufacturing to transportation and energy infrastructure. A carbon tax would help drive the transition by giving consumers a more appropriate market signal. It would also induce entrepreneurs to innovate and invest in alternative products and technologies. We have a long way to go, and the transition needs to be mostly complete by mid-century. CONCLUSION There is nothing wrong or bad about energy independence per se. It has modest economic benefits, and doesn’t hurt national security or foreign policy (though the benefits are negligible). However, as I have shown, the purported benefits are typically overblown – energy independence is not a panacea for either the economy or national security. The problem with energy independence is that it doesn’t go far enough. In any event, US prosperity and security are intertwined with that of Europe and Japan; if they remain energy dependent, the US economy and freedom of action cannot remain unaffected, even if we’re energy independent. Any level of energy independence must include at least our allies and trading partners (creditors, too?), if not the entire world. We cannot isolate ourselves. Energy independence must not rely on fossil fuels; such an “independence “ is simply unachievable, and would be temporary even if it could be achieved. It would continue our dependency on a non-renewable resources that are increasingly difficult and expensive to produce, and which thus act as a brake on economic growth. It would also allow us to continue adding carbon to the atmosphere, imposing significant costs over the long term. Every dollar invested in chasing more fossil fuels is one less dollar for energy efficiency and renewable energy. Energy independence through energy efficiency, energy conservation, and renewable energy would provide more economic opportunities and benefits over the long-term, and begin to reduce carbon emissions. However, if the goal is simply cost-effective use of efficiency and renewables, or energy independence conceived simply as eliminating oil imports, it allows carbon emissions to continue grow. Energy independence, then, must be subordinate to hydrocarbon independence, which implies energy efficiency, energy conservation, and renewable energy. Achieving even hydrocarbon independence for and by ourselves would be a good first step. But eventually it must include the rest of the world, not just the US. Energy efficiency, renewable energy, and energy conservation (i.e., using less) are our best hopes for an independent and energy secure future. 4/29/14: The original post of this article incorrectly stated the amount of oil that the US currently imports from Russia.

FBI agents investigating a Wilmington man for threats he allegedly made against a Roxbury mosque and an Islamic student group at Northeastern soon discovered he was also having lots of fun with guns - which he wasn't supposed to, given that he's a convicted felon. Patrick Keogan, 44, an electrician who works on high-voltage wires, was charged this week in US District Court in Boston with making threats against the Islamic Society of Boston and being a felon in possession of ammunition. He's the second person in a little more than a year charged with threatening the mosque on Facebook. In an affidavit, an FBI agent who investigated Keogan wrote the case began in November of last year, when the Islamic Society of Boston contacted the FBI over a threatening message posted to the mosque's Facebook page on Nov. 14, the day after the Paris terrorist attacks: Although it is not uncommon for the ISBCC to receive hateful and anti-Muslim messages, the Executive Director’s initial reaction to this post was fearful because the post occurred in the immediate aftermath of the November 13, 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, which authorities attributed to Muslim extremists. The Marketing Director subsequently notified federal law enforcement authorities and removed the post from the ISBCC Facebook page per ISBCC policy. ... In addition, on November 17, 2015, the Northeastern University Police Department received a report that a person named Patrick Keogan, with the same profile photo, posted the same threatening message on the Facebook page of the Islamic Society of Northeastern University (ISNU). Keogan also "liked" his post on the mosque Facebook page. The FBI looked up the screen name of the Facebook posting in RMV records and found a guy with a similar picture and a Wilmington address - and learned that in 2013, the bureau had investigated Keogan for making threats against an unspecified congressman and that in an interview, he acknowledged "he is often vocal about his political beliefs, especially when drinking." In December of last year, FBI agents chatted with Keoghan again, on the phone: Keogan said that he had reposted the burning mosque picture on Facebook after the Paris attacks. Keogan said that he had been upset and "dicking around online." Keogan said that he was sorry and that he needs to smarten up as he is too old to act this way. Keogan also said that he does not intend to harm Muslims or commit any damage to mosques. After getting a warrant to search all of Keogan's postings on Facebook, agents learned he'd been "dicking around" with anti-Moslem posts for several years: The PatKeogan account contains records that approve of burning mosques as early as 2013. On or about August 30, 2013, the PatKeogan account shared a post saying that "someone vandalized the Islamic Center of Burlington's sign (that is placed at the mosque's entrance) overnight with white spray paint," about which the PatKeogan account user said "WHOEVER DID THIS I FUCKING LOVE YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1." In a comment on the post, the PatKeogan account user wrote, "I drive past thes [sic] all the time & have always wanted to run the fucking sign over." The affidavit adds: The PatKeogan account also contained posts deriding the Jewish faith, "brown people," homosexuals and liberals. The agent who wrote the affidavit acknowledged that much of what he wrote is protected under the First Amendment, but said he cited it to buttress his case that the specific threats - which are not protected speech - were written by Keogan. While browsing his Facebook posts, FBI agents found evidence he was also getting closer to guns than he should, given his status as a convicted felon - he has a 2006 conviction for assault and battery with a dangerous weapon and a 2000 conviction for OUI. Keogan frequently posted photographs of his weapons and also discussed obtaining weapons and weapon accoutrements, building weapons, and shooting his weapons. For example, on or about June 21, 2013, Keogan posted a photograph showing the remnants of what appears to be several shaving cream cans at a rifle range, accompanied by the comment, "160 rounds thru the AR-10. Kicks like a mule, cycled 100% flawless. Took the stay puff marshmallow man down. Bled out like a stuck pig. Gongs? 20/20 every time. Sounded sweet. BOOM-K'TING! How's the work day going? Ima go grab a cold one..." Based on my training and experience, and taking in context the photograph and other content within the search warrant return, I understand the comment and picture to mean that Keogan shot 160 rounds of ammunition from an AR-10. An AR-10 is an assault rifle manufactured by Armalite that fires large-caliber 7.62 x 51mm (.308 caliber) rounds. ... One of Keogan's friends responded, "I am glad to see you are buying an AR-15." Keogan replied, "I am building a Beowulf" and "It's an AR-10. 22's are for phagits." Based on the context and my training and experience, I understand that a Beowulf is a model of firearm, and that Keogan was claiming that he was building an AR-10 rifle rather than buying an AR-15 rifle, which he disparages with the term "phagit" because AR-10 rifles fire larger ammunition than do AR-15 rifles (.308 caliber versus .223 caliber (a/k/a .22 caliber)). The affidavit asserts that sometimes, Keogan combined his love of guns with his love of hatred: On or about September 26, 2015, Keogan posted a photograph depicting six black rifles and one black shotgun lined up on a wooden floor, with the caption "My black friends." On or about the same day, Keogan posted a photograph under the caption "This is what I feed 'em," which appears to depict dozens of boxes of ammunition on at least five shelves with small placards that appear to identify the various calibers of ammunition, as well as ammunition on the floor. Based on my training and experience, and taking both photographs in context, I believe that the caption to the second photograph is intended to convey that he uses the firearms depicted in the first picture to shoot the ammunition depicted in the second picture. On or about the same day, Keogan posted a photograph of what appears to be himself standing in a residence and smiling while holding an AK-47-style assault rifle attached to four high-capacity firearm magazines taped together to form a Nazi swastika, under the caption "Swastimag is best mag." But none of this is resulted in his being charged for ammunition possession. That came from his alleged May 1, 2016 visit to a gun shop in Plaistow, NH - which the FBI knows about because by that time, they'd received a court order to put a surreptitious GPS device on his car. He chatted up the clerk for awhile, then bought "two boxes of ammunition, the plastic bags of loose ammunition, and what appeared to be several packages of beef jerky, all with cash." The bags contained "20 to 25 rounds apiece of corroded World War II-era junk 8mm rifle ammunition." Innocent, etc.

More than 500 barbecue grills seized in three-month campaign are cut up so they cannot be used again Beijing is waging a war against air pollution, one barbecue at a time. Officials have destroyed more than 500 open-air barbecues to cut particulate matter. Photos carried by state media showed workers cutting pieces of metal as city wardens looked on. A media officer at Beijing's Xicheng district administration bureau said hundreds of barbecue grills had been confiscated in a three-month campaign and cut up so they could not be used again. Ma Jun, an environmental campaigner, said residents had complained to environmental agencies in the past about the odour and smoke from open-air barbecues. "This action will help local residents, but to deal with the bigger air quality problem we need to have priorities and I think one of the major priorities should still be the motor vehicle emissions," said Ma, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs. He said the focus should be on improving the fuel quality and emissions control of heavy duty diesel trucks, while also involving the surrounding regions, not just Beijing. The capital's pollution regularly reaches hazardous levels. The city government announced last month that emergency measures such as factory shutdowns and traffic limits would be imposed when air pollution levels were particularly heavy.

The heir apparent to DeMarco Murray's role as the starting running back of the Dallas Cowboys looks like it will be former Oakland Raiders first-round pick Darren McFadden, according to Clarence Hill of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. McFadden is expected to be the No. 1 back Sunday night when the Cowboys take the field against their NFC East rivals, the New York Giants. Of course, it's unlikely that any of the team's running backs will approach the NFL-leading 392 rushing attempts that Murray took in 2014, and the team will rely much more on a running-back-by-committee approach, no matter who gets the starting nod. On Wednesday, Cowboys head coach Jason Garrett spoke about the merits of using multiple running backs and said that it's advantageous having a versatile array of backs who can stay fresh. McFadden earning the starting nod is a little surprising considering he is listed third on the team's depth chart and third-year back Joseph Randle was expected to take over. Lance Dunbar is listed as the second running back, with newly acquired Christine Michael behind McFadden. The Cowboys signed McFadden to a two-year, $3 million deal in March, but he took just seven carries in preseason and added two receptions. After reportedly pursuing a trade for Montee Ball to add depth at running back, the Cowboys landed Michael in a trade with the Seattle Seahawks, sending a late-round pick in exchange. In seven seasons with the Raiders, McFadden tallied 4,247 rushing yards and 25 touchdowns, in addition to 1,769 receiving yards and five touchdown grabs. He earned a reputation for injuries in Oakland and finished the first 16-game season of his career in 2014. * * * SB Nation presents: Keys for the Cowboys' opener and more on the new NFL season

U.S. efforts to develop the next-generation high performance computing (HPC) platform are lagging because they don't have government funding. In China, it's a much different story. China has impressed analysts with its rocket-speed commitment to HPC. It had 72 systems in this month's Top 500 supercomputer list, making it the No. 2 HPC user in the world. Five years ago, it had just 10 systems in the Top 500 list. Along the way to achieving its HPC goals, China built what was for a time the world's most powerful supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A. The U.S. remains far and away the leader in the field for now, with 250 HPC systems on the Top 500 list. U.S.-based tech firms build most of the world's systems. But U.S. dominance today is no guarantee of future success. Last week at SC12, the annual supercomputing conference, a panel of HPC researchers from China was asked about that nation's exascale plans. Depei Qian, a professor at Beihang University and director of the Sino-German Joint Software Institute, said that China has historically been five years or more behind the U.S. Although China has tried to close the gap in recent years, Qian said: "Still, I guess three to five years will be the reality" of the gap between the two nations' efforts. Earl Joseph, an HPC analyst at IDC, had a different take. "The Chinese are being very polite -- their goal is to build it (an exascale system) first," he said. Part of China's effort includes building an indigenous tech industry. "What I think is interesting is the dedication (in China) to creating a home-grown economy for computing," said Pete Beckman, director of the Exascale Technology and Computing Institute at Argonne National Laboratory. Beckman points to the way China is building large systems. For its Tianhe-1A system, China turned to U.S. chips -- Intel's Xeon processors -- but used a China-developed interconnect. With its Sunway BlueLight supercomputer, China used its own chip, the Shen Wie SW 1600 microprocessor, but with InfiniBand interconnects. "You can see what they're doing," said Beckman, explaining that China's developers reduce risk by mixing and matching standard technologies with homegrown approaches. "Now, you can see what's going to happen," said Beckman. "You take your homegrown CPU, the homegrown network, and you put them together and you have a machine that from soup to nuts is a technical achievement for China and is really competitive." The quest to build an exascale system that's 1,000 times more powerful than the petaflop systems being deployed today may be the biggest challenge yet in HPC. It requires new programming models and methods to manage data and memory, along with improved system resiliency.

BENGALURU: He was caught with 4.3 kgs of ganja, but the 50-year-old man from Chamarajanagara district has been acquitted of all charges by the Karnataka High Court all because of a police error. While recording its complaint against him in Kannada, it said he was carrying "ganja soppu." Although charged under section 20(B)(ii)(b) of the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, the man has now walked free because ganja, commonly referred to as marijuana, hash or weed, has a specific definition under the Act. It describes the soft drug as a flowering or fruiting top of the cannabis plant. But "ganja soppu" implies the plant he was carrying had stems, roots and seeds as well. Seizing on this simple error by the police, the advocate for the accused was quick to point out to the court that nowhere in the NDPS Act it is said that ganja has leaves, seeds or other parts of the cannabis plant. In other words his client was technically not carrying ganja, he argued. A helpless government advocate could hardly deny that ganja has a particular definition under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act and the "soppu" the man was carrying by the police's own admission did not fit the description given. The case ended with the "soppu" winning the day and the court quashing all proceedings against the accused.

The 'Last Jedi' star helped close out the Celebration with a funny story involving himself and Carrie Fisher sneaking into a movie theater. Luke Skywalker himself helped send Star Wars Celebration off in style. Mark Hamill spent his time at the event speaking with fans, teasing Star Wars: The Last Jedi and delivering a funny and emotional tribute to his late co-star Carrie Fisher. So it was only appropriate that on Sunday he told yet another endearing story about one of his many real-life adventures with the actress. They were hanging around the studio lot after filming 1977's Star Wars and he met her for lunch in Westwood. (See his full panel above.) The two walked by a movie theater, and Fisher told him that the trailer for Star Wars was playing in there. Neither had seen it, and Fisher told Hamill to ask the manager if they could be let in just to watch the trailer. "I said, 'Why don't you do it?'" he recalled. "She said, 'Well, you've been on television for seven years. You've been on all these TV movies." So Hamill went to the woman working at the box office and explained that he and Fisher were two of the actors in a movie trailer being shown there. She rather reluctantly got the manager, who agreed to let them in to see the trailer. "We went in and we watched it. It was so early they didn't have John Williams' score. They didn't have very many special effects finished at all. A couple of shots of TIE Fighters, I think," said Hamill. "It made a real impression on me because we hadn't seen any of the footage." But the actor also recalled that the trailer wasn't totally embraced by the audience at the screening. "At the end of the trailer, it said, 'A billion light years in the making. And it's coming to your galaxy this summer.' Big explosion. And somebody in the balcony yelled out, 'Yeah, and it's coming to the late show about two weeks after that,'" said Hamill. "Nobody enjoys a well-placed, snarky remark more than I do. So we both laughed, but after we laughed, we kind of went, 'Uh oh.'" Here's the trailer: Earlier in the panel, the star said it's nice to be back as Luke on the big screen, because he's spent years meeting young children who have no concept of time and don't realize Star Wars was made decades ago — and those kids are shocked by how he looks today. "Their parents, who were young children when the movies came out, would get very excited and push them toward me … 'Look who it is! It's Luke Skywalker!' And you look at these 5- and 6-year-old kids, just horror-stricken. 'Oh, my God! What happened to this guy? He really let himself go,'" related Hamill. "To have us come back, show that the aging process is natural, makes me less self-conscious." Hamill also spoke of shooting the original Star Wars and asking creator George Lucas if he could tweak the lines. Lucas would say no, but Hamill noticed Harrison Ford ad-libbed and wouldn't get rebuked for it. Why was that? "He [Ford] said, 'Look, don't ask. Just do it. [Lucas] has got so many things on his mind. A: He might not notice, and B: He might like it better if he sees it in performance,' " Hamill recalls his co-star saying. Hamill also announced his web series Mark Hamill's Pop Culture Quest was returning for a second season, with an expanded run-time of eight 22-minute episodes. He also confirmed he appears in Netflix's Mystery Science Theater 3000 revival, getting involved after he donated to the project's Kickstarter and was contacted by the team. Surrounded by fans, Hamill also spoke about his bona fides as a fan, noting he went to conventions before he knew Lucas. "I want you to think of me as a friend, not as an internationally beloved BAFTA winner and pop-culture icon," he joked. "I mean that in a humble way. Not in a horrible, egocentric way. Maybe a little bit."

Officials say the estimate represents their best approximation after gathering figures. | REUTERS White House broadens Obamacare exemptions Millions of Americans who had their health plans cancelled will be exempt from the Obamacare individual mandate, the administration said Thursday — a surprise move that comes just before Monday’s deadline to sign up for coverage starting Jan. 1. The administration also said people who had their plans cancelled could get a scaled-back catastrophic plan, which has more limited benefits than those included in other Obamacare health plans. Story Continued Below The move prompted sharp criticism from Republicans and concern from the insurance industry that another last-minute change would disrupt coverage and lead to tumult in the new marketplaces. ( Also on POLITICO: For Obamacare boosters, all memes are good memes) “This latest rule change could cause significant instability in the marketplace and lead to further confusion and disruption for consumers,” said Karen Ignagni, president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, an industry trade group. Republicans who have fought the individual mandate as one of the most hated aspects of the sweeping health law said the change was one more sign of a failed policy. “The administration is recognizing the grim reality that more Americans have lost health insurance than gained it under Obamacare,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said Thursday evening. “Holding a fire sale of cheap insurance is not a responsible fix for a broken program. This is a slap in the face to the thousands of Americans who have already purchased expensive insurance through the Obamacare exchanges.” ( Understanding Obamacare: POLITICO’s guide to the ACA) President Barack Obama had often said that people who liked their health plans could keep them under his health law and the wave of millions of cancellations was politically damaging, particularlyas the HealthCare.gov debacle made it so hard for people to shop for replacement coverage. Obama, whose poll numbers have dropped sharply, was forced to concede last month that he was wrong to have made that pledge. The administration said fewer than a half-million people whose plans had been cancelled had not yet found new coverage. But the new rules outlined Thursday night will allow people to get a “hardship exemption” if their new alternatives are too expensive. ( Also on POLITICO: Michelle Obama steps into health care spotlight) Joanne Peters, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said, “This is a common sense clarification of the law. For the limited number of consumers whose plans have been canceled and are seeking coverage, this is one more option.” Administration officials noted that some of the people who lost plans were able to get subsidized ones in the new exchanges. The catastrophic plan, which was always a part of the Affordable Care Act, is an option for people under 30 and for those who qualify for specific exemptions, such as affordability. Under the new policy, people would have to provide proof of a canceled policy to qualify for the exemption. “These consumers should qualify for this temporary hardship exemption and I can assure you that the exemption will be available to them,” HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius wrote in a letter to six Senate Democrats who requested a policy change. “As a result, in addition to their existing options these individuals will also be able to buy a catastrophic plan to smooth their transition to coverage through the Marketplace.” ( PHOTOS: 25 unforgettable Obamacare quotes) The administration does not expect many people will take up the new option, but wants to ensure that catastrophic coverage is available to those who had plans canceled. But making catastrophic health plans more broadly available also poses problems for insurers. It could disrupt the insurance pools, since insurers and actuaries had assumed that people shifting from the old individual market would go into the new bronze, silver or gold plans on the Obamacare exchanges. And allowing people to opt out completely could further depress enrollment, already below target because of all the website problems. Follow @politico

I've previously written about 3-on-3 overtime, first as a staunch activist and now as a proud supporter. In sum, I had the chance to play it in junior. It's end-to-end exciting action, with tons of talent on display in the open ice ... and oh buddy, is it hilarious watching forwards try to play defense. There are exceptions, but most skilled forwards - even if they can defend at their own positions - will be exposed when they're forced to drop in coverage, skate backwards, and try to figure out timing and gap control while playing against the game's most talented players. Below is a quick look at an overtime winner last night, and an issue that's going to cost some teams some games. I love this goal. ***** First, give it a watch. I recommend starting it around the 30-second mark to really soak the awkwardness in, but feel free to go with the whole thing. (Courtesy: NHL.com) The obvious thing to note here is that this came on a delayed penalty which makes the scenario a little different, but the screw up is still going to surface where it did on straight 3-on-3. OK! Today we're going to be watching Matt Nieto, a 5-foot-11, 22-year-old forward from Long Beach, Calif. He’s coming off a 10-goal, 27-point season with the San Jose Sharks and enters this season with expectations that he’ll exceed those totals fairly handily. Below, Nieto knows his guy is Matt Bartkowski. He's leaving Bartkowski a pretty sizeable gap here, which isn't great, but the reality is you can't stick too close to a guy in 3-on-3 or he'll jump by you, and suddenly he's tapping in a back-door feed. Nieto can close on him from here. Nikolay Goldobin takes down Jannik Hansen, and is getting a penalty. He shouldn't have done that. Penalties, it turns out, are bad. From there, Hansen has the wherewithal to get up and stay on the puck, and he circles it back up top. Get ready for lots of this in overtime - guys ragging the puck looking for holes while their linemates offer support, and look for soft, dangerous areas of ice to exploit. That Nieto gap, though … it's still pretty ugly. "But at least he's in front of me," I'm guessing he's thinking. But as I mentioned, it's not catastrophic - if the Canucks D-man gets the puck he can rush out into him in his lane and prevent disasters, which in 3-on-3 is definitely a reasonable consideration - no major meltdowns (a policy that gets abandoned in like six seconds). What is borderline disastrous, is the gap by Dylan DeMelo, who allows Adam Cracknell the room to skate up high without staying within range (their separation is just occurring above). More on this in a second. The puck eventually goes from Hansen to Bartkowski, and with Goldobin following Hansen up that high, a switch with Nieto makes a ton of sense. Goldobin will (and should) move to Bartkowski because he's close enough to apply quick pressure on the puck and force the Canucks to make a play in a dangerous area. Bartkowski gets the pass by Goldobin, and the puck goes to Cracknell (rather oddly, actually - the lane to Blair Jones is safer). This play would’ve been a whole lot easier had DeMelo kept a tighter gap on Cracknell, regardless of whether the following situation were going to be a 1-on-1 or 2-on-1. Now he’s flat-footed, and whoa, do the Canucks have oceans of time and space in hockey terms. So OK, now what? Well, in Nieto’s simple forward mind (I mean forwards are simple, not Nieto), Hansen is his guy off the switch; had the fourth forward not jumped on the ice, that would probably be just fine. But he has, and with DeMelo leaving the slot area so untouched, Nieto needs to hit the big red panic button like a hanging curveball, and hit it hard. This is now a 3-on-2 with DeMelo the guy who's left outnumbered (his own doing or not, it's time for Nieto to read and react). A defenseman would know what to do here. Quick sidebar: This was a common misconception of those arguing against 3-on-3 in the first place - that teams would just sag to the low-middle and it'd be boring. As you can see above, even if the fourth Canuck doesn't jump on the ice, the gap Cracknell is left with would still be a full-on panic party. Sagging creates major issues when you're three-up. Forwards are going to have to defend similarly to the penalty kill - stops and starts, tons of effort, lots of help bailing each other out, and those with less agility will find themselves entirely out of the rotation before long. Anyway, here's where it just gets funny. DeMelo now can't run out at Cracknell, because he's looking at a 2-on-1. Getting aggresive and allowing a pass to Jones would mean conceding a breakaway. And Nieto is, well, a forward, which means that his defensive instincts lead him to the reflex of "Hope for a save, I guess?" The two of them sagging back half-heartedly while Cracknell loads a shot up for what feels like 13 seconds legitimately made me do the fast-nose-exhale near-laugh thing the first time I saw it. (Courtesy: NHL.com) I mean look, Nieto is in a tough spot, and he certainly got no help from DeMelo. But there is no time - no time at all - where you let "But that's my guy over there!" override the chance to stop a clean shot from the slot. You at least rush out and make Cracknell make a pass to the goal line and make Hansen complete a perfect one-timer. That was one sleepy defensive effort. (And frankly, he's not covering either guy.) Systems in hockey are a set of loose rules and guidelines that take you to areas of the ice where you have the best chance to prevent things from happening like "unthreatened shots from between the hashmarks." (I actually think it's a little funny that, as the puck goes in, Nieto was turning to either cover Hansen better or get a rebound, as opposed to realizing what was happening and going at Cracknell.) As the year goes on, expect to see a lot of this. Gap control and coverage can be brutally awkward for those unfamiliar with the nuances. I'm excited for a season's worth of forwards in positions where they have to think like defensemen, where they make a decision so far from correct it reminds you of a preseason game.

A new vulnerability has been found in iphone by Security Research firm FireEye. The researchers at FireEye found out about a malicious Application which can work like a keylogger. It is well known that the iPhone doesnt have much but apparently this malicious app is programmed keeping that in mind, therefore it can be safely said that this App may be first of the kind of ‘Touchloggers’. The App can read every touch or tap made by the user and record the same in its log. This basically means that this app can keep data of every movement made by the iPhone user. As such even if the user locks or unlocks his/her iPhone or types anything or opens any App, this malicious App can record everything and send the logged or shall we say ‘touchlogged’ information to any external server. FireEye is the same Security research firm which had previously discovered a major flaw/zero day vulnerability in Internet Explorer. To read that article kindly visit here : Read More: Zero Day Vulnerability Found in Internet Explorer By FireEye Security Researchers FireEye Says that “We have created a proof-of-concept “monitoring” app on non-jailbroken iOS 7.0.x devices. This “monitoring” app can record all the user touch/press events in the background, including touches on the screen, home button press, volume button press and TouchID press, and then this app can send all user events to any remote server, as shown in Fig.1. Potential attackers can use such information to reconstruct every character the victim inputs.” According to FireEye this malicious App which takes advantage of a key flaw in the iOS multitasking capabilities to allow the hackers/attackers to record the iPhone users every tap or swipe, has so far only been found in Non-Jailbroken iOS 7.0.x device which means that Jail broken iPhones are immune to this particular App. FireEye has also said that the logged files containing the ‘touchlogs’ are then transferred to unknown command and control servers. The Apps concept relies on Apple’s background refresh technology because an iPhone can run several apps in background and can collect information of every touch made on device. iPhone has Option to turn off background refreshing of applications but researchers have said that disabling background refresh may not restrict the touchlogging of this malicious app. FireEye gave the example of the “Music player App” on a iPhone. The Music Player App keeps on continuously refreshing itself even if background refresh has been disabled by the user. This App, FireEye says, works in a similar fashion, refreshing data even when background refresh is Disabled. Until Apple releases Patch for this flaw or vulnerability, the only thing iPhone users can do is keep an eye on the running Apps in the Task Manager and kill any App/Task which seems unnatural.

With the No. 43 overall pick in the 2016 NBA Draft, the Houston Rockets selected Zhou Qi, an enormous Chinese big man with major boom-or-bust potential. Zhou is 7'2, and his 7'8 wingspan is the largest ever seen at the NBA Combine, according to Draft Express. That's immediately the most impressive thing about the 20-year-old, who considered declaring for the 2015 NBA Draft before deciding otherwise. Despite his size, Zhou is incredibly mobile, running the floor and moving his feet on both ends. He has an excellent mid-range jumper and he'll shoot a three-pointer from time to time, too. Combine that with an advanced post game and Zhou is probably the most polished offensive center in the draft. In a game against Korea, you can see Zhou put the ball on the floor, hit layups with both hands and even show a pull-up jumper dribbling in from the three-point line, all advanced skills that are incredible for his size. Zhou is also a sensational shot blocker, leading the Chinese Basketball Association with 3.4 swats in 34 minutes per game. His height and mobility means he can make up huge swaths of ground, easily rejected shots when he's on the weak side However, there are major concerns about Zhou's frame. He weighed only 218 pounds at the NBA Combine, which is less than some guards in this same draft, and certainly less than any other big man 6'10 and up. Zhou's size means he's easily bullied in the paint, struggling to defend in the post and to rebound. Zhou is sometimes too passive, too, although he's improved over the past few years. Still, Zhou has drawn a lot of attention, especially from his own country. After Yao Ming's brief superstardom and Yi Jianlian's quick return to the CBA, the basketball-adoring Chinese would love to see another one of their countrymen succeed in the NBA. Despite his size, Zhou is a completely different prospect than Ming due to his quickness. Because he's as frail as he is, though, there are concerns that Zhou's career could go in a similar direction, being plagued with injuries as the sheer number of games wears on him. With modern nutrition and a full-time NBA training staff, there's hope that Zhou can bulk up and fill out his frame. To successfully navigate the grueling 82-game season, he will have to figure it out. Zhou's jump shot and high-end offensive skillset makes him one of the most exciting prospects in the entire draft. However, it's also easy to see Zhou going out like Yi Jianlian's short, five-year career. For now, Zhou is a major question, fully capable of both paths. Now the exciting part of his career begins.

Chloe Ayling reportedly burst into tears when police caught her lying about her alleged kidnap ordeal British model Chloe Ayling burst into tears when police caught her lying about her alleged hostage ordeal, it has been reported. Ms Ayling, 20, claims she was snatched, drugged and held hostage for six days by a group calling itself Black Death after being lured to a bogus photoshoot in Milan in July. Polish brothers Michael, 36, and Lukasz Herba, 30, are in custody accused of her kidnap and this week a British judge ruled Michael should be extradited to Italy to join his sibling to face allegations they kidnapped the model before demanding a 300,000 euro (£264,000) ransom. It has now emerged Ms Ayling, of Coulsdon, south London, was quizzed by police over nearly 13 hours in three separate interviews about her alleged ordeal, according to The Sun. Police documents reveal the model was asked about the tracksuit and shoes she was wearing. Ms Ayling claimed she was handed them before leaving the house near Turin she says she was held in. But the shopkeeper who sold the items contradicted her version of events and told police she was with Lukasz when they were bought. A court sketch of Michal Konrad Herba appearing at Westminster Magistrates' Court last week. A judge ruled he should be extradited to Italy to face kidnap charges Chloe Ayling says she was bundled into a car after arriving for a bogus photoshoot in Milan Lukasz Herba has been arrested in Italy and faces a kidnap charge, which he denies When confronted with the claims, Ms Ayling broke down and admitted she went with Lukasz to buy the shoes. A police officer then asked why she lied, to which Ms Ayling replied: 'I don't have a reasonable explanation.' In another interview on July 17, a police officer asked her if she thought it was strange she went to buy shoes with her alleged captor. Ms Ayling replied saying Lukasz was the one person who could save her. Italian police claim the Polish-born brothers are part of the 'Black Death' group, which says it sells women as sex slaves on the dark web to buyers in the Middle East. Ms Ayling claims she was sedated and bundled into the boot of a car after being tricked into attending a bogus photoshoot in Milan on July 11, then held captive in a remote farmhouse. Michal Herba (left, with with brother Lukasz in Milan in July) was arrested by the UK's National Crime Agency (NCA) on a European Arrest Warrant issued by the Italian authorities last month Ms Ayling claims she was sedated and bundled into the boot of a car after being tricked into attending a bogus photoshoot in Milan on July 11, then held captive in a remote farmhouse Her alleged captor, Lukasz Herba, is in custody in Milan, having been arrested after delivering Ms Ayling to the British embassy on July 17. He has said he did not knowingly take part in any crime. Michal Herba was arrested by the National Crime Agency (NCA) on a European Arrest Warrant issued by the Italian authorities last month. Herba was apprehended in the Tividale area of Sandwell in the West Midlands, and has been requested by the court of Milan for a single offence of kidnapping between July 11 and 17. Fighting the extradition earlier this week, Mr Scott: said: 'There is a real risk that the entire case is a sham.' Italian police released a reconstruction photo of a woman in a suitcase after the arrest Picture of the mountain house where Chloe Ayling was allegedly held in the village of Borgial near Turin Pictured is the room where 'kidnapped' British model Chloe Ayling was allegedly held by captors He pointed to a 'unique set of anomalies', including claims that Ms Ayling went shoe shopping with her captor and had breakfast with him before her release. He also highlighted the model's string of television appearances and plans to release a book, arguing the extradition would amount to an abuse of process if the kidnapping had been a 'publicity stunt'. But on Friday, the judge said the 89 pages of 'open source' material relied upon by Mr Scott came entirely from reports in the media. 'I make clear that is not evidence to support it being a sham,' he added. The case is expected to go to trial by the end of the year.

Taking the Carbon Out of Coal play mute max volume play stop repeat full screen Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin Program Summary A company called SCS thinks it can use coal to generate electricity while cutting down 90 percent on carbon emissions — and still make a profit. The company’s PurGen plant, which would be located on the site where an old Dow Chemical plant used to stand near the New Jersey Turnpike in Linden, NJ, would use a technology called carbon capture and storage, or CCS. Carbon dioxide coming from the coal would be captured and pumped in liquid form deep underground, where it would — presumably — stay. To continue using coal while achieving an 83 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, as called for in proposed legislation being discussed in Congress, will require increasing amounts of CCS in the coming decades. The PurGen plant would not burn coal, but rather turn it into hydrogen through a process that generates a stream of pure CO2 as a by-product. The hydrogen would be burned to make electricity with very little air pollution — but only when the demand for electricity is high, and the plant can get a good price. At times when demand is low, the hydrogen would be diverted and converted on-site into the chemical urea, used to make fertilizer. The storage part of SCS's plan involves building a two-foot-diameter pipeline to carry liquefied CO2 from the plant, under the Arthur Kill — a waterway separating New Jersey from Staten Island — and 140 miles out to a point on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, where it would be injected and stored about 8,000 ft. beneath the sea floor in a suitable geological formation. Supporters say the plan is a perfect solution to several problems at once — how to use the nation's cheap, plentiful coal supply without adding heat-trapping CO2 to the air, how to provide clean electricity to a part of the country that has to import power, and how to spark a green energy industry that could help the US maintain economic leadership in a time when China and other nations are determined to wrest it away. But not everyone thinks the PurGen project is a good idea. For one thing, even if the plant makes electricity cleanly, the mining and transport of coal will still have environmental impacts. For another, some worry that sequestering CO2 underground hasn't been adequately tested yet. And other critics say the money for PurGen would be better spent on solar or wind energy or energy efficiency — challenging the very premise that finding a way to use coal without carbon emissions is needed. Credits: The News Market, Shutterstock

The world’s first algae-powered building in Hamburg, the BIQ House, features a bio-adaptive algae facade. International design firm Arup worked with Germany’s SSC Strategic Science Consultants and Austria-based Splitterwerk Architects to develop the BIQ House, which launched as part of Hamburg’s International Building Exhibition. Arup predicts buildings will fundamentally transform over the next 50 years due to developments ranging from jet-powered maintenance robots to high-rise farms and photovoltaic paint, all of which are already in development. But first and foremost, Arup envisions a movement towards living buildings that respond and adapt to the conditions around them. “The urban building of the future fosters this innate quality, essentially functioning as a living organism in its own right – reacting to the local environment and engaging with the users within,” contends Arup. The BIQ House is the first major step towards that vision. According to Arup, the facade of the BIQ House is designed so that algae in the bio-reactor facades grows faster in bright sunlight to provide more internal shading. The ‘bio-reactors’ not only produce biomass that can subsequently be harvested, but they also capture solar thermal heat – and both energy sources can be used to power the building. This means that photosynthesis is driving a dynamic response to the amount of solar shading required, while the micro-algae growing in the glass louvres provide a clean source of renewable energy. The integrated algae-based system will be put into full operational mode at an inauguration event later this month. + Arup Via Daily Mail

Total Recall Total Recall is a look back at the history of video games through their characters, franchises, developers and trends. Rockstar North is a video game developer known and respected the world over as the creators and continued custodians of the core Grand Theft Auto series. That's earned it a reputation as a specialist in the field of mature, cinematic video games. Games where drugs are dealt, prostitutes killed and people say fuck with a straight face. So it's easy to see how people forget it's also the same studio that made Lemmings. Rockstar North hasn't always been called Rockstar North. It was once an independent video game developer known as DMA design, which was founded in the Scottish city of Dundee in 1988. After releasing a couple of games for cult hero publisher Psygnosis, in 1990 the team designed a game called Lemmings. It starred stupid little creatures with green hair that you had to save from repeated and grisly doom. Advertisement It would go on to sell over 20 million copies. For the duration of the 1990's, Lemmings' success (and production line of sequels and spin-offs) allowed DMA the indulgence of experimenting with as many game genres as they could get their hands on. They released a racing game (Uniracers), a Space Hulk-esque tactical shooter (Hired Guns), a side-scrolling shooter (Walker), a platformer (Space Station Silicon Valley), a tank combat game (Wild Metal Country) and a weird 3D action game called Body Harvest. Oh, and also a little something called Grand Theft Auto, along with every core console game in the series to date. Advertisement So why is Rockstar North simply the house that GTA built, and not also the house built by some of the PC's best titles of the 90s, including one of the first great casual successes in the platform's history? There are two reasons. One is simply the name change. After a succession of messy purchases, sales and transfers in the late 1990's, DMA ended up becoming a part of the newly-formed Rockstar Games, which in turn was owned by Take-Two Interactive, after which DMA's name was changed to Rockstar North, which it still uses today. So the DMA-to-Rockstar link isn't explicit if you don't know the history. Advertisement Another is a key change in personnel. For a long time DMA was headed up by David Jones, one of the studio's founders and the man often given credit for the creation of both Lemmings and the Grand Theft Auto series. Yet just before the transition from DMA to Rockstar North, Jones left the company, and would go on to found Crackdown and APB developers Realtime Worlds (which has since gone bust). While the people at the top changed as dramatically as the studio's name during that transition period (Jones replaced at the top by Sam & Dan Houser, who continue to head up not just Rockstar North but Rockstar Games as a whole), it's still the same studio. Many developers carried over during the shift, bridging the gap and ensuring the "DNA" of DMA remained intact. Advertisement It wasn't a case of, as you see so often these days, a studio literally closing down and some of its former members relocating elsewhere. This was the same studio simply given a new name. So next time you see somebody saying they hate Rockstar, that all they make is cinematic fluff, that all they do is bait tabloid newspapers with risquee content, remember: they also made Lemmings! Sort of. Total Recall is a look back at the history of video games through their characters, franchises, developers and trends. Advertisement You can contact Luke Plunkett, the author of this post, at plunkett@kotaku.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.

The night he came… wait… what the hell is that?! As bad as the Michael Myers masks may have been in the post-Halloween 2 installments of the franchise, even they look menacing when compared to the countless mass-produced masks that Halloween costume companies have put out over the years. While Trick or Treat Studios is killing it with screen-accurate replicas, other companies, well, they’re not doing so great. You get what you pay for, and that’s perhaps never been more true than it is when we’re talking about the cheap Myers masks you’ll find in stores like Kmart and CVS. They’re truly awful, but wouldn’t it be kind of funny if Michael Myers actually wore those masks in the films? You damn right it would be, and one artist has taken it upon himself to imagine such a world. Says Marc Schoenbach, who runs Sadist Art Designs: We’ve all seen those terrible Michael Myers masks…. but what if they were used in the films instead of the iconic one? These images made us laugh. We hope they make you laugh too.

Once conservative activist James O’Keefe released the raw footage of his latest undercover video, in which former NPR SVP Ron Schiller is taped saying some seemingly vicious things about Republicans and claiming that the radio network would be “better off without federal funding,” analysts began to question whether the editing that went into the originally released tape was fair. This was likely inevitable, considering the way his last sting panned out — it turned out the video that brought down ACORN was edited in a highly misleading way, and a judge cleared the group of any wrongdoing upon viewing the raw footage. Last week, Glenn Beck’s website, the Blaze, looked into it and discovered “editing tactics that seem designed to intentionally lie or mislead about the material being presented.” And this morning, NPR itself finally aired a piece on how “elements of the NPR gotcha piece were taken out of context.” Too bad CEO Vivian Schiller (no relation to Ron) was already forced to resign last week. You should really go over to the Blaze and read the analysis yourself, because it’s pretty thorough (although in the end relatively unforgiving of Ron Schiller and almost regretful in its partial exoneration of him). But here are the basic points: 1) Although much has been made of the fact that Schiller was meeting with a group linked to the “Muslim Brotherhood in America” in the first place, the fake board members actually downplayed the link themselves. 2) Schiller did not laugh in assent, as it appears, to the idea of instituting Sharia law across the world. He laughed at another funny situation that was unrelated, and that reaction was edited into the Sharia conversation. 3) When he refers to Republicans and the tea party as “really xenophobic” and “seriously racist, racist people,” he’s actually quoting what another Republican told him. In fact, he speaks positively about fiscal conservatives and small-government advocates. 4) In the edited video, Schiller is seen suggesting that modern-day tea partiers may be less educated than liberals, but his lunch companion, NPR’s Betsy Liley, defends the intellect of Fox News viewers. 5) When he talks about the idea that NPR might be better off “in the long run” without federal funding, an edited-out portion included him explaining why local stations still need it, and why NPR continues to advocate for public funds. Those are pretty much the main points of scandal from the original eleven-minute clip, and each one has proven to be misleadingly edited. As we said originally, Schiller’s kowtowing to these guys was an unattractive display, even without editing. But at a certain point, liberal institutions should start counting these O’Keefe videos as actual victories. If he can’t make a compelling video without absurd cutting and pasting, surely these places are actually doing something right. At the very least, they’ll hopefully stop firing people the minute the “stings” are released and start learning from their mistakes — something O’Keefe himself seems strangely unwilling to do. Does Raw Video of NPR Expose Reveal Questionable Editing & Tactics? [Blaze]

Let’s review the bidding North Carolina awards 72 delegates. A portion of those, in the far right column on the graphic, were awarded based on the primary vote. The remainder, 33, consist of 30 chosen at-large at the state GOP convention, May 6-8, plus three reserved for party leadership. The selection of the 39 bound delegates is underway and will end on April 23. These 39 are only bound for the first ballot. As the Republican Convention, barring some sort of a deus ex machina, is almost certainly going to be contested, the actual loyalties of the delegates is more important than who they are committed to on the first ballot. So how is this working out for Donald Trump? Much as you might expect. With 24 of 39 delegates slected, he’s getting his ass kicked by John Kasich so far: So, in this batch of committed delegates, if the voting goes to a second ballot, Donald Trump gets ZERO votes from North Carolina. You can bet that his convention take isn’t going to be much better. As we’ve seen over and over, the Donald Trump campaign it raising incompetence to previously unseen heights. Trump’s idea was that he goes out, gives speeches to big rallies, and then gets the nomination. In short, he has run his campaign as he has run his business ventures. We’re just waiting for the bankruptcy filing.

Getty Images Running back LeGarrette Blount’s time as a free agent lasted a bit longer than expected, but it has come to an end. The Eagles announced on Wednesday that they have signed Blount. Ian Rapoport of NFL Media reports that the deal is worth up to $2.8 million for the 2017 season while Adam Schefter of ESPN reports that the Cardinals also showed interest in Blount before he made his deal with Philly. Blount ran 299 times for 1,161 yards and 18 touchdowns with the Patriots last season and New England reportedly made an offer for him to return, but it wasn’t where Blount wanted it to be and the Patriots have added Rex Burkhead and Mike Gillislee to the backfield in the interim. They also extended a rarely-used tender to Blount that means his signing with the Eagles will count as part of the compensatory pick formula for both teams despite the May 10 deadline passing before he reached agreement on a deal. That didn’t stop the Eagles, who will plug Blount into a backfield group that also includes Ryan Mathews, Darren Sproles, Wendell Smallwood and fourth-round pick Donnel Pumphrey. There was speculation that Mathews would be exiting the group before Blount was signed, however, and that will probably tick up with the veteran back in the fold.

In 2016, Madrid could finally get the cycle network it needs. Last week, the city announced a major plan to crisscross the Spanish capital with 33 new cycle paths. Costing €40 million ($44 million), the new network is due to be completed before the end of next year, a period that will also see the extension of Madrid’s bike-share scheme to a new zone south of the city center. Proposed as part of the first city budget from the administration of Mayor Manuela Carmena, elected in June, the bike plan is a welcome change for the city. At present, less than 1 percent of all city journeys are being made by bike, while seasonal pollution levels have become so high that Madrid has tried to level off the worst peaks with car restrictions, free public transit, and alternate driving days. If Madrileños are going to get cleaner air and safer streets, some cars in the city clearly need to get off the roads. Making cycling easier won’t work as the sole tool for that objective, of course, but it’s still an important part of the package. To be fair, the city has been pushing towards reducing car numbers for some time. Since January, Madrid has banned anyone without a guaranteed parking space from driving into a central section of the city, relieving pressure on a narrow-laned, often hilly zone never built with cars in mind. This made some streets more breathable but still did little to reduce car commuting from the wider region. As for cycling, Madrid tried to make some headway under former Mayor Ana Botella, whose administration introduced a bike-share system and created 70 kilometers (44 miles) of cycle lanes. These efforts boosted the number of cyclists on the roads, but they’ve also been accused of being counterproductive. The total budget for the new lanes was very low—just €600,000—meaning the city had resources for little more than painting on lanes and adding some signage (not all of which was accurate). These lanes were frequently added not to roadways but to sidewalks, creating new tensions between cyclists and pedestrians that did little to improve the former’s image in the city.

About This Game Real-time fantasy battles: spectacular fight scenarios on grandiose battlefields, featuring thousands of soldiers and powerful heroes such as Sir Lancelot, Sir Galahad or Merlin. Battles rely on the strengths and weaknesses of the different arms with several tactical possibilities, the abilities of the units and the heroes, monsters and most of all, spells. spectacular fight scenarios on grandiose battlefields, featuring thousands of soldiers and powerful heroes such as Sir Lancelot, Sir Galahad or Merlin. Battles rely on the strengths and weaknesses of the different arms with several tactical possibilities, the abilities of the units and the heroes, monsters and most of all, spells. Turn-based Campaign Map: Britannia is represented as a fully three dimensional topographic map where heroes move freely, conquer provinces or find adventures. In the turn-based campaign the changing seasons have effect on the gameplay and the graphics of the Campaign Map. Britannia is represented as a fully three dimensional topographic map where heroes move freely, conquer provinces or find adventures. In the turn-based campaign the changing seasons have effect on the gameplay and the graphics of the Campaign Map. Create your own legend! The saga of King Arthur is an epic tale about the conquest of Britannia through a story-based campaign. The Campaign is divided into chapters, like a chronicle, each with a unique tone and theme. The chapters all have objectives, long- and short-term goals that also fit together to draw a grandiose picture of an unfolding storyline. There are many possible events and outcomes that all influence the legend itself and determine the ending of the storyline. The saga of King Arthur is an epic tale about the conquest of Britannia through a story-based campaign. The Campaign is divided into chapters, like a chronicle, each with a unique tone and theme. The chapters all have objectives, long- and short-term goals that also fit together to draw a grandiose picture of an unfolding storyline. There are many possible events and outcomes that all influence the legend itself and determine the ending of the storyline. Morality Chart: Every decision in the game will influence the position of King Arthur on the Morality Chart. King Arthur might become a Christian ruler or the Follower of the Old Faith; a rightful or a ruthless monarch. These choices unlock special contents, allies, heroes, units and developments. Every decision in the game will influence the position of King Arthur on the Morality Chart. King Arthur might become a Christian ruler or the Follower of the Old Faith; a rightful or a ruthless monarch. These choices unlock special contents, allies, heroes, units and developments. RPG elements: Heroes lead the armies and learn skills, spells and abilities from an ability tree for experience points. Heroes can also use magic items or become liege lords, entrusted with the leadership of a province, which is the best way to have them indebted. Arranging their marriages with the nice damsels of Arthur’s court also raises their loyalty. Heroes lead the armies and learn skills, spells and abilities from an ability tree for experience points. Heroes can also use magic items or become liege lords, entrusted with the leadership of a province, which is the best way to have them indebted. Arranging their marriages with the nice damsels of Arthur’s court also raises their loyalty. Adventures: adventuring is the essence of King Arthur’s world. Quests pop up on the Campaign Map regularly. In technical terms it is a short story where the chosen knight has to make important decisions. Some adventures end in battles on special battlemaps. Welcome to the lost age of chivalry, where magic and myth is alive, and you are destined to be one of the living legends: Arthur, the son of Uther Pendragon, the Once and Future King of the prophecies.Fulfill your destiny and claim your rightful place on the throne of Britannia. Recruit fabled knights to your Round Table: send them to adventures or battles, let them gather knowledge and artifacts, see how they become the most powerful heroes of the realm. Build the majestic Camelot, but beware: there will be enemies, both mortal and otherworldly that will try to destroy you. Send your heroes and their followers to battle with legendary warriors and monsters and see how the folk of the faeries and the saints set against wizards and evil knights.

Deputies: Man arrested after shooting car driven by ex-girlfriend's boyfriend Copyright by KXAN - All rights reserved Copyright by KXAN - All rights reserved Rudolfo Saucedo Booking Photo from March 3rd. (Photo courtesy of Williamson County) Deputies: Man arrested after shooting car driven by ex-girlfriend's boyfriend Rudolfo Saucedo Booking Photo from March 3rd. (Photo courtesy of Williamson County) prev next KXAN Staff - AUSTIN (KXAN) -- A man was arrested Sunday afternoon after deputies say he shot a car being driven by his ex-girlfriend's boyfriend. According to the Williamson County Sheriff's Office they received a disturbance call at the Hendrix Apartments just after 1 p.m. Copyright by KXAN - All rights reserved Rudolfo Saucedo Booking Photo from March 3rd. (Photo courtesy of Williamson County) Copyright by KXAN - All rights reserved Rudolfo Saucedo Booking Photo from March 3rd. (Photo courtesy of Williamson County) When deputies arrived on scene they found that a man had fired shots into a vehicle being driven by another man. The shooter, identified as Rudolfo Saucedo, 34, was charged with Aggravated Assault with a Deadly Weapon and taken into custody. The driver of the vehicle was not injured in the shooting. The driver and his girlfriend told deputies that the scene started when Saucedo, her ex-boyfriend, confronted her current boyfriend. After the confrontation her boyfriend went to leave in his car when Saucedo shot at it a couple times. Saucedo has been booked into the Williamson County Jail. In March Saucedo was booked into the Williamson County Jail after being charged with Criminal Trespassing.

Copyright by WIVB - All rights reserved Julie Algubani, Executive Director of Western New York Muslims Copyright by WIVB - All rights reserved Julie Algubani, Executive Director of Western New York Muslims BUFFALO, N.Y. (WIVB) - A local community is devastated and in shock. Following the arrest of Lackawanna resident Arafat Nagi, 44, local Muslim leaders are speaking out. "People need to recognize that the Lackawanna community in no way, shape, or form wanted any of this to happen and this is not the norm," said Executive Director of Western New York Muslims, Julie Algubani. Nagi was arrested Wednesday after federal authorities say he pledged allegiance to terrorist group ISIL, used social media to recruit other supporters and allegedly purchased items he planned to use to fight for their cause. Algubani told News 4 stereotyping is not a new obstacle for Muslims, and she hopes the arrest doesn't create new tensions. "Unfortunately because Islamophobia is so strong, we are, you know we recognize that it's so strong. And unfortunately it's something that as a Muslim in the community we have to deal on a daily basis whether something like this happens or not," she said President of the Muslim Public Affairs Council of Western New York, Dr. Khalid Qazi sees things a little differently. "There obviously are some issues in terms of some Islamophobes that do exist in many communities and to some extent in our community also but the community in general has been very welcoming," he said. There are 25,000 Muslims in Western New York. Those is Lackawanna are mostly from Yemen. Dr. Qazi says Nagi was no longer part of that community. "He had withdrawn from the community about three years ago. He had some domestic issues, some family issues," Dr. Qazi told News 4. Since Nagi's arrest, Dr. Qazi has been working with Muslim leaders in Lackwanna, meeting regularly to have open discussions on how best to address the situation. He and Algubani agree Nagi's alleged actions are out of character for the community, and hope continued discussion can ease anxiety for both Muslims and non-Muslims living there.

AL Election Stolen by the Democrats via Pervasive Voting Fraud, Recount Demanded, Court Orders Ballots Destroyed State of the Nation Moore Didn’t Lose; Doug Jones Only ‘Won’ with Democrat Vote Fraud, RINO Collusion, Fake MSM Pre-election Polls and Judicial Corruption by Alabama Courts “If the Democrats are allowed to steal an election as controversial as the Roy Moore special ballot, especially with the national media spotlight on every aspect, it will be very easy for them to use the same playbook for the 2018 midterms. That’s why it is imperative for Team Trump to expose the whole fraudulent electoral process. Everyone knows Deep State has been rigging elections forever; now it’s time to shut down the election theft for good.” — Longtime Political Analyst Another election in America, another transparent case of outright voting fraud. The U.S. electoral system is now SO broken that the American people fully expect their elections to be stolen by the Deep State favorite. This is what it has come to, so there’s no surprise whatsoever that the Alabama Senate race was full of fraud and corruption at every level. Evidence of Voter Fraud in Alabama As Mobile County Results Come In Late Not only did the Mainstream Media at the national level attempt to fix the result by repeatedly leveling false accusations against Republican Roy Moore, they published entirely fake poll data at every turn. Too much at stake not to steal it Let’s face it: there was way too much at stake politically for the Democrats not to steal this election. From their crooked perspective, they simply had no choice if they are to regain a majority in the U.S. Senate. Democrats will always engage in totally unscrupulous campaign conduct and vote fraud in order to steal an election anywhere in the 50 states. They have always done this, because that’s what ultra-liberals and left-wing extremists, dyed-in-the-wool socialists and hardcore communists do everywhere around the globe. VOTER FRAUD! DNC OFFERS FREE BUS RIDES FOR BLACK VOTERS IN GEORGIA TO VOTE IN ALABAMA In light of the political calculus in the U.S. Congress, it’s now clear that Deep State will assist the Democrats in every election theft possible between now and the 2018 midterms. How did Deep State steal the victory from Roy Moore? Honestly, it’s much easier to list the things that the Democrats did properly and lawfully in the conduct of this chaotic campaign season and toxic election. Which is ZERO! Nothing! Zip! The Democrats pulled out all the stops as far as fraudulent campaign practices and vote fraud were concerned. When all the evidence is in and evaluated, this election will go down in ‘Bama history as the most rigged of all time. Here’s just one example of a quite obvious initiative to cover up the election theft. Election security experts question Alabama’s decision to destroy ballot copies As far as Roy Moore is concerned, his campaign staff was fully braced for this naked election theft. So were the many Republicans throughout the great state of Alabama, as were the many Democrats who flipped during this election because of so much outside interference. Roy Moore Won’t Concede, Knows Election Was Rigged N.B. What follows is an analysis of this rapidly unfolding election theft by former NSA employee and freelance investigator Jim Stone. It’s a play-by-play account well worth considering. UPDATE: MOORE CALLS FOR RECOUNT, BUT COURT ORDER ALLOWING DESTRUCTION OF BALLOTS MAY PREVENT IT by Jim Stone Moore has called for a recount but the court order I mentioned earlier still gives election officials permission to destroy the ballots, and prevent a recount that way. YOU READ THAT RIGHT!!! I WILL REPEAT: Even if Moore requests a recount, it can be blocked by election officials simply destroying the ballots before a recount can happen! GTFO!!! UPDATE: RECOUNT ALL BUT CERTAIN As it turns out, write in votes were all going to Moore and they suddenly flipped for Jones. This has triggered official suspicions that the election was stolen. Add to this the fact that purely black areas suddenly stopped turning in enough votes to push Jones way ahead once he was a little bit ahead makes things look very suspicious. It was obviously calculated, and not a legitimate count. There are rumors about the write-in ballots being thrown out due to the obvious tampering. At latest reporting that I have seen, Moore is only 4,000 away from Jones. An impossible razors edge. If the write-ins that got stolen are discarded, Moore will win, but there will still be an automatic recount. How that is managed will determine it all, if the ballots are still present and there are enough witnesses, major fraud may get busted. QUESTION: How does Moore stay at an equal percentage away from Jones when ONLY Democrat area votes are being counted, all the way up the last 14 percent of votes? YOU GUESS! Obviously, even a majority of Democrats voted for Moore, and they did not allow Moore even that part of the vote. Nothing in this for me is “suspicious”, it was outright fraud. Let’s see how a recount called tonight affects that court decision to allow the ballot records to be destroyed. As I predicted, they stole it by 1 percent. Actually, it’s worse. They stole it by 1.04 percent, because if it hit one percent there would have been an automatic recount. If the election fraud does not stop, the only thing we can possibly do is plot an overthrow of the present corrupt system. That is absolutely the only way things can be made right when it is impossible to get a fair vote count. REALITY: Moore 70, Jones 30. The steal may ram a fraud down our throats, but it won’t change the way the people really voted. There is a cold, hard reason why the Alabama Supreme Court issued a special ruling to allow all ballots to be destroyed by morning, and we just saw it. IT IS OVER, THEY ALREADY STOLE IT. MOORE LOST. Jones picked up 50,000 votes in one burst, during which Moore picked up zero. They are flat-out stealing it. Most likely they are not counting ballots at all. There is a reason why the Alabama Supreme Court stepped in and said all ballots could be destroyed before morning. And we just saw it. Here is proof they are rigging it. With 68 percent of the vote counted, Moore had 53.5 percent and Jones had 45.1 percent. Then, with 71 percent of the votes counted, Moore had 51.6 percent and Jones had 47 percent. It does not work that way. The percentage of votes for a particular candidate cannot swing so much over such a small percentage. There is definitely a steal going on. MOORE WILL DEFINITELY LOSE TO ELECTION FRAUD. UPDATE: The Alabama Supreme Court stayed Montgomery County Circuit Judge Roman Ashley Shaul’s order to “preserve all digital ballot images” in Tuesday’s hotly contested special election for Alabama’s vacant U.S. Senate seat. REASON: BECAUSE THEY CAN NOW GET AWAY WITH STEALING THE ELECTION, ALL THE BALLOTS WILL BE DESTROYED BEFORE MORNING. IT IS NOW RIDICULOUS TO BELIEVE MOORE MIGHT WIN, BECAUSE THEY HAVE SCAMMED THE ELECTION TO WITHIN THE RANGE THEY NEED TO STEAL IT. The actual vote is somewhere around 70/30. If they have scammed it down to 52/47 they will DEFINITELY, WITHOUT QUESTION finish stealing it. Alabama election update UPDATE: ROY MOORE WILL LOSE. They have already rigged the vote down enormously, and have it within the percentage range that will allow them to steal it during the night. When you wake up tomorrow, Moore will have lost by about 1 – 3 percent. DONE DEAL. We cannot have fair elections with Deep Staters doing all the counting (and yes, they do) they worm their way into these positions over time and are well paid to do it even if it is “volunteer”. Watching the trends going on now, Moore absolutely will have it stolen, and will therefore “lose”. The only way out of the situation we are in is probably a civil war. A PROPERLY DIRECTED civil war. Yes, Trump may drain his neighborhood but the problem permeates out to the state and local levels, and beyond just the government. This will not be overcome without a war. There is a reason why America’s elections are always so close. That reason is because Deep State only rig them barely enough to win, because with everyone in the break room saying they voted for the loser, they simply can’t get away with rigging it more than that. ______________________________________ From what I can find, there is record turnout and even blacks are voting Moore. They are seeing through the media manipulative crap. But there is a problem, and that is that the media is continuously pushing that it is a close race, when really it is approximately 70 percent Moore. That means they are very likely to steal this. Trump can’t afford to lose Moore, and the Left can’t afford to have Moore get in. Since leftists predominantly count the votes, whatever they do will be balanced only by what they believe they can get away with. Clearly Moore took this election. Whether or not the vote counters allow that is yet to be seen. (Source: http://82.221.129.208/.zp2.html) Conclusion There is no real democracy when the elections nationwide are routinely fixed and stolen. The authenticity of a constitutional republic relies on the absolute integrity of the electoral process. Without fair and fraud-free elections, the American Republic is essentially an illegitimate state entity. Therefore, We the People are compelled to take back our power from the Deep State usurpers who have systematically stolen it over many decades. Likewise, the electorate is obligated, as per their civic duties, to stand in their newfound truth and speak that truth to power like never before. In the absence of this sea change throughout the body politic, the United States of America will continue its disastrous descent into a cultural Marxist cataclysm. Cultural Marxism Is Destroying America Let’s get busy! Before the midterms are also rigged and Deep State completes it ongoing coup d’etat against a sitting POTUS. State of the Nation December 13, 2017 Editor’s Note As for how Deep State actually stole this election, the following account demonstrates the easy slam dunk that this vote fraud was for the perpetrators. Here’s How Deep State Stole the Election from Roy Moore ___ http://stateofthenation2012.com/?p=90979

Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) on Monday said police union leaders should be more focused on keeping guns from the insane than pointing fingers at politicians over the murder of two New York City policemen. Rangel offered criticism of New York City police union leaders who have directed their ire at New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. ADVERTISEMENT “They should be conducting interviews mourning those that they lost and their family, talking about how do insane people get firearms and not criticizing but seeing how we can stop insane people from getting an opportunity to get firearms to kill anybody,” Rangel said on MSNBC’s “The Rundown.” “Two human beings were shot dead, we should not be pointing fingers at the mayor of the city of New York.” The weekend killing of the two officers in an ambush provoked strong criticism from some police unions and politicians. They blamed de Blasio for creating an unstable environment by siding with critics of police after a black man died in Staten Island in an altercation with the police. During the mayor’s press conference Saturday, a group of officers turned their backs to de Blasio as he walked through. And the president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, a New York police officers union, said in a letter that “the blood of these two officers is clearly on your hands.” Rangel dismissed those claims and said that the true takeaway of the tragedy should be an increased push for gun control, specifically focused on restricting access to guns by the mentally ill. “What we should do is follow Cardinal Dolan [the Archbishop of New York] and have our spiritual leaders say, ‘Hey, we can fight this after the burial, after we heal the wounds that are lost by this tragic episode,’ ” he said. “We’ve got serious problems to deal with and screaming and pointing fingers about ‘blood on your hands?’ No, we have to come together as a city.”

(CNN) -- Heavy winds from a severe storm caused significant damage, shattered windows and sent debris raining down on passengers at an airport in St. Louis Friday night. The Lambert-St. Louis International Airport is closed indefinitely while officials investigate the damage, St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay told reporters. "There was a reported sighting of a tornado. Although that has not been confirmed, that storm caused significant damage to the airport," he said. The reported tornado twisted metal and blew out plate-glass windows in the airport's main terminal, CNN affiliate KSDK reported. Four people were transported to nearby hospitals with injuries, Slay said. Passengers were hit with flying glass and debris as winds ripped off part of the roof in the airport's C concourse, the station reported. One witness described a chaotic scene outside the terminal as officials evacuated passengers from at least one aircraft. "The plane was rocking back and forth," said Brett Knewitz of Albuquerque, New Mexico, who was on a plane that was about to take off from the airport when the storm hit. Initially officials did not allow evacuated passengers into the airport, he said, because of concerns that the building's roof would collapse.Once he was allowed inside, Knewitz said he saw an injured gate agent. "She was bleeding like crazy," he said. Concourse C is used by American Airlines, AirTran and Cape Air, airport spokesman Jeff Lea said. The National Weather Service said witnesses believe a tornado was on the ground for several miles and observed the twister from a tower at the airport. KSDK reported that the storm also blew the steeple off a church and forced authorities to close highways. CNN's Marlena Baldacci, Taylor Ward and Greg Morrison contributed to this report.

A puppy who loves her Santa chew toy meets Santa and her reaction is the best thing you'll see all day. (Published Tuesday, Nov. 29, 2016.) Watching this pup’s dreams come true will get you into the holiday spirit. Pictures of an adorable dog went viral after she got to meet the big guy himself, Santa. I was attacked w kisses yesterday💄💋🐶 A photo posted by Kya🐾 (@kyastagram) on Sep 5, 2016 at 11:50am PDT It was last Christmas when Kya, a 1-year-old doggy from Orlando, received a plush Santa doll. It quickly became Kya’s favorite, and the family needed to get another one shortly after, the family told Today.com. John Montaldo, 16, was struck with a brilliant idea after seeing their local mall had a pet day photo op with Santa. Pets could go sit on Santa’s lap for a photo, and the family agreed this was Kya’s time to shine. What they didn’t expect was Kya’s amazing reaction. Kya kept sneaking excited glances at Santa as they patiently waited their turn. The moment came and it was more than the family expected. Kya’s big smile shining through made the photo a viral sensation. John thought it would be funny to post for his friends on Twitter, but it has since garnered more than 150,000 likes and nearly 90,000 retweets. Santa’s little helper has been indeed a very good girl this year.

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. - One year and two days after 20-year-old Daniel Rowe was shot and killed while taking out the garbage at a Riverside restaurant, Jacksonville police announced an arrest in the case. Rowe was shot July 22, 2015, in an alley behind the Blind Rabbit, near the intersection of King and College streets, during what police described as a robbery attempt. Monday afternoon, standing with Rowe's parents, JSO Director Tom Hackney announced an arrest in the case. "It's taken a while, but I've got some answers," Hackney said, adding police took their time to build their case. "We don't want an arrest, we want a conviction." Erron Coleman, 25, was charged with murder, plus armed robbery, burglary and weapons charges. Coleman has 12 previous felony convictions and was a suspect in a 2015 strong-arm robbery when a tip from an inmate led police to investigate his connection to Rowe's death. "We knew they were out there working as hard as they possibly could to get to this point, so it’s a bittersweet day for us," said Raelyn Rowe, Daniel's mother. She said she was grateful for the police, the Justice Coalition and the community for support, and even the media for not letting the case be forgotten. Hackney said tips were key to breaking the case, but the investigation will not end until Coleman's accomplice is also in jail. Erron Coleman's criminal history In Oct. 20, 2010, Coleman was convicted of multiple burglaries and car thefts and sentenced to 5 years in prison. He served 3½ years on 11 charges and was released on Nov. 21, 2014. Coleman was arrested Nov. 30, 2015, and charged with three counts of burglary and held on $225,000 bond. On April 28, 2015, Coleman was charged with a March 25, 2015, robbery and his bond was increased to $ 1 million. July 25, Coleman was charged with the murder of Daniel Rowe. Photo: Florida Department of Corrections "As I’ve stood up before you many times in cases I say it’s that one little piece of the puzzle that we need," Hackney said. "And I ask for seemingly innocuous information to come forward, and in this case that one particular thing pointed us in the right direction." The primary tip that led to this arrest will receive a $13,000 reward from Crime Stoppers, and a $3,000 reward is still available for tips leading to a second arrest. Callers can remain anonymous and still be eligible for the reward by calling 866-845-TIPS. "These guys – JSO -- is not going to give up until they find him, and we’re going to be standing right behind them," Raelyn Rowe said. Daniel Rowe's mother describes heart-breaking year without her son Monday evening, Rowe's parents said they finally have some sense of peace knowing police had a suspect in custody. After the news conference, Raelyn Rowe spoke with News4Jax about the heart-breaking year without her son. "It's an indescribable journey of just learning how to survive. You have to learn how to rebuild a new normal," Raelyn Rowe said. She said she and her husband took in her son's fiancee and his two little girls after her death. They were tasked with explaining to them what happened to their father. "Amelia is still just a year and a half old. She doesn't even remember him at all. She was only 5 months old when this happened. Colby just turned 5. She has a lot of good memories with her dad," Raelyn Rowe said. Raelyn Rowe said the announcement of Coleman's arrest was a welcome surprise. She said waiting for a break in the case made the healing process that much more difficult. "Once you're in you're grieving process, you get to a point where you're just ready to move to the next step of it. And if nothing's happening, and you're just having to wait, that's really hard to get over that hump," she said. Through it all, Raelyn Rowe said she's grateful to JSO, the community and everyone who has supported their family. She said never lost faith in the detectives working to find her son's killer. "We knew they were out there working as hard as they possibly could to get to this point. So it's a bittersweet day and we have won. There's still more work to be done and we will stand behind them and let them do their jobs until we get to the end of it," Raelyn Rowe said. The mother said she hopes the second person wanted in her son's death does the right thing and turns himself into police. Copyright 2016 by WJXT News4Jax - All rights reserved.

‘I use poppers,’ Crispin Blunt declared this afternoon in the Commons as MPs gathered to voice opposition to the government’s proposals to ban the legal drug as part of the psychoactive substances bill: ‘I out myself as a popper user, and would be directly affected by this legislation and I’m astonished to find that it’s proposing to be banned and, frankly, so were many other gay men.’ The Conservative MP appeared to inspire Michael Fabricant to offer up an equally candid confession: I informed the Tea Room discussion on poppers that I had tried them, but that my bottom remains intacta. https://t.co/gTfgDB9Kj2 — Michael Fabricant (@Mike_Fabricant) January 20, 2016 While Fabricant opposed the government’s plan, he says he is not a regular user of poppers as they can make him feel dizzy. .@MavisStott It made me feel dizzy! I'm not a personal fan of them, but I'd rather they be used instead of glue or worse if they were banned — Michael Fabricant (@Mike_Fabricant) January 20, 2016 Back in the Chamber, Keith Vaz offered his own take on poppers. The Labour MP conceded that poppers are ‘beneficial in enabling anal sex’: ‘The government recognises that representations have been made to the effect that ‘poppers’ have a beneficial health and relationship effect in enabling anal sex for some men who have sex with men, amid concern about the impact of the ban on these men.’ Alas for all their efforts, it wasn’t enough to save the legal high. MPs voted not to exempt poppers from a ban on psychoactive substances. Well, you can’t say they didn’t try.

Incoming: Liberty Public Market San Diego's big public market unveils three big new concepts By Troy Johnson Rendering of the incoming Liberty Public Market, set for a November open (we guess more like December). Every city wants one of these. A public food market on par with Pike Place in Seattle or the Ferry Building in San Francisco. A hall of food, an amusement park for your discerning mouth. And now Liberty Public Market is reportedly two months away from its debut in November (a betting man might say December is more likely). The 22,000 square-foot project next to Stone Brewing in Liberty Station, spearheaded by Coronado’s Blue Bridge Hospitality (Stake Chophouse, Leroy’s, etc.), will include 30 mostly local food vendors. It’ll have bread, coffee, wine, cheese, seafood, meat, produce, a restaurant, a bar, beer, juice bar, ice cream, lobster rolls, desserts—everything that’s legal and consumable. Some of those vendors have previously been announced, including Venissimo Cheese, Le Parfait Paris, Liberty Meat Shop (run by local butcher icon, Tommy Battaglia), Cane Patch Pies, Cecilia’s Taqueria, Fully Loaded Juice, Local Greens, Mastiff Sausage, MooTime Creamery (a Blue Bridge concept), WestBean Coffee Roasters, Wicked Maine Lobster, Pasta Design, Stuffed, Point Loma Tea, Fishbone Kitchen and Parana Empanadas. Today San Diego Mag breaks news on their newest projects. First, four new vendor concepts: Crafted Baked Goods (from Blue Bridge’s pastry chef Francis Laureano, formerly of Bottega Louie), Mama Made Thai, Bread & Butter (a co-op of the city’s best bakeries) and a produce section featuring San Diego farm goods. Then, four big announcements: Mess Hall. An on-site, sustainably-focused restaurant headed by Blue Bridge exec chef Tim Kolanko (ex-A.R. Valentien). What will the restaurant do? It’ll take the best of what the vendors bring to market that day and create a daily menu. The restaurant will also host pop-ups by local chefs, traveling chefs, culinary education dinners, etc. It’ll also give Kolanko’s talented younger chefs (from Leroy’s, Stake, etc.) a chance to design their own menus for a day. Bottlecraft. The popular San Diego-based craft beer bottle shop will open their third location in the main room leading out to Liberty Market’s large patio. It’ll have a tasting bar with 24 beers on tap and big retail aspect. Grape Smuggler. Stake Chophouse and Bar has one of the country’s top sommeliers in Greg Majors, who formerly worked at Tom Colicchio’s Craft Restaurant and Robert Bohr’s former CRU, to name a couple. Grape Smuggler will have about 300 different wines, pulled from everywhere. A killer liquor license: Liquor licenses are weird. You can often drink in this part of a place, but not that part. The way that Liberty Market is set up, Mess Hall and Bottlecraft will occupy about a third of the space, with the vendors set up in partitioned areas in the “market” part. Thanks to a good liquor license, you’ll be able to grab a beer at Bottleshop or a glass of wine at Grape Smuggler, and then walk throughout the market and shop with your drink. Sounds awesome, and dangerous. With Stone's success next door, and San Diego's top pizza joint Buona Forchetta opening their second location a few hundred feet away, it looks like Liberty Station is finally hitting its stride.

Over-65s made up 14.4 per cent of the population in 2014. NZ First leader and senior citizens' champion Winston Peters isn't fazed by a new political party founded by disgruntled pensioners. The New Zealand Seniors Party has announced its intentions to enter candidates in the 2017 election. Members have complained about the "lack of interest" shown by the Government in the deduction of employer and employee-funded overseas pensions from the New Zealand Superannuation scheme. But Peters, who was responsible for the introduction of the SuperGold Card in 2007 and is regularly a guest speaker at Grey Power meetings, says senior citizens' issues are not his "territory". READ MORE: * Can we afford the superannuation status quo? * What Budget 2016 tells us about the next election * Watch: Recap chat with Finance Minister Bill English "We're the only party though who have tried to do something for them...and we're the only party with a policy to help them. But if you've got a few who think they can go somewhere else and start a party and waste their supporters' money then that's their business," he said. For every dollar a pensioner receives from an overseas pension, the New Zealand payment is reduced by a dollar. However, some people are unaware they qualify for an overseas pension. Failing to apply for overseas pensions can result in NZ Super payments being stopped, or never started. The NZ Super payments to spouses of people with overseas pensions can also be reduced. "Today's seniors are tired of being ignored and dictated to by politicians, government departments and their overpaid staff," the party said in a statement. "They are educated and bring a lifetime of experience and knowledge to the table, and they are certainly capable of taking an active role in the running of their own country." Party spokesperson Barnaby Perkins said a group of 25 pensioners met in Wellington a week ago to talk about pension deductions and agreed to form the party. "It was a political problem and it needed a political solution," he said. However, proper policies were yet to be decided on. The group were concentrating on getting at least 500 members to register the party. So far, they had 100 on board. The seniors territory was usually charted by NZ First, Perkins acknowledged but he said they weren't doing enough. The NZ Seniors Party was more "specific" in its aims. "It's not just an oldies party, it's really for anybody," he said. "It's a horrible fact of life but you're all going to become pensioners at some stage if you're lucky enough to live long enough." The party would also be having a view on the euthanasia and medical marijuana debates. Perkins personally was open to both. In 2014, there were 650,000 over-65s in New Zealand, equating to 14.4 per cent of the population. It's projected that by 2038, the number of over-65s will almost double to 1.29 million and make up almost 23.3 per cent of the population. By 2068, over-65s are forecast to make up 27 per cent of the population. Finance Minister Bill English allocated $12.9 billion to NZ Super in the 2016 Budget.

A preliminary investigation by Mexico City's human rights commission has found evidence of police brutality and arbitrary detentions during the violent protests during last Saturday's inauguration of President Enrique Peña Nieto. The ongoing investigation has identified at least four cases of possible torture, three of them involving electric shocks, as well as 22 cases of unjustified arrests among the 70 people still in jail in relation to the protests. Many of these face a preliminary charge of "attacks against the public peace", which carries a long prison term. "The important thing here is that the authorities provide convincing evidence that the people who are sanctioned were really involved in the events and that we don't see people criminalised who were protesting peacefully or, in some cases, not even participating in the protests," the head of the commission, Luis González Placencia, told MVS Noticias. The day began with intense clashes between masked youths and federal police around 10ft high barricades set up to keep protesters away from the inauguration ceremony in the congressional chamber. These events left one protestor in a coma and another without the sight in one eye. Further clashes with city police broke out later on the outskirts of the city centre, while roving gangs smashed up businesses in the area. These events coincided with the arrest of around 100 people by local police, though around 30 of these released within hours. There were also non-violent protests, and the commission's investigation partially supports the claims of activists and relatives of some of those in jail who insist the police went after the wrong people, including two Romanian freelance journalists. The investigation drew from the testimony of those arrested as well as videos and photographs that have been widely circulated on social and mainstream media. In one video, a man in a mauve shirt is seen standing in front of riot police verbally demanding that they release detainees not in the picture. An officer comes up from behind to pick him up and carry him behind police lines. Placencia said the case was "emblematic" of a trend in police strategies in which "they encapsulate a person, take them away, and then try to justify some kind of link with criminal activities". The city human rights commission's investigation does not include allegations of excessive use of force levelled at the federal police, or the claims that it used plainclothes provocateurs. The federal authorities have denied charges that police used rubber bullets. The city authorities have said people in civilian clothes photographed behind federal police lines were actually contracted workers called in to chain the barricades together.

Are you a fervent acolyte of the on-demand video streaming revolution and yet still yearn for some of the old-school television charm? OttoPlay is an add-on for Netflix (and YouTube and Hulu) that brings back the old channel surfing feel, letting you skip across “channels.” It may be more rewarding than normal recommendations, at least. OttoPlay comes as a Chrome extension, and once you’ve got it up and running in Google’s browser, head to your on-demand service of choice. Click the extension icon and a series of themed channels (kids, drama, comedy and so on) appear on the screen, spread across Netflix, Hulu and YouTube (if you’re outside the US you may run into access problems). Advertisement Of course, the layout of these different ‘channels’ into times and slots is just an illusion created by the app, but it’s an alternative way of seeing what’s available on your favorite services and finding something you might be interested in. Use the virtual remote on the right to flip through the channels or to focus on one service in particular.

In a Facebook post Tuesday, the Palestinian Fatah group listed a number of its achievements. At the top: the killing of 11,000 Israelis. The post was carried by Fatah’s official page. It was translated by the watchdog group Palestinian Media Watch. In its boast, Fatah also notes other achievements, such as losing 170,000 “martyrs,” being the first to carry out attacks in the First Intifada, which began in 1987, as well as in the second that launched in the fall of 2000. It also takes credit for leading the Palestinian campaign against Israel in the UN. Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up Fatah, led by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, is widely seen as the more moderate of the two main Palestinian factions. Hamas, the Islamist terror group which rules Gaza, is Fatah’s main competitor. The current Fatah post is likely linked to the upcoming Palestinian municipal elections, set for October 8, in which Fatah and Hamas are expected to contest seats in most Palestinian municipalities. In many places in the West Bank, Hamas members will be running without openly identifying with the movement, which has been suppressed by PA forces in areas under its control. Much of the Fatah Facebook page is currently devoted to criticizing Hamas. According to PMW, this wasn’t the first time Fatah made such a boast. A similar message appeared on Fatah’s Facebook page in 2014. https://www.facebook.com/Official.Fateh.1965/photos/a.1591709777754363.1073741828.1591249977800343/1735120870079919/ If Hamas wins significant gains in the municipal election, it could signal its successful attainment of a firm foothold in the territory. Last week, analysts suggested that Hamas likely agreed to the municipal elections out of the belief that the aging and unpopular Abbas would be a weak opponent. Fatah has tried to prevent Hamas gains by putting pressure on the group ahead of the vote. On Monday, a senior Hamas member decried the Palestinian Authority’s ongoing arrests of its members in the West Bank, according to Israel Radio. He said the persecution of Hamas members showed that Abbas’s government was not conducting fair and democratic elections.

While many people may know her as a finalist on The Voice , Christina Grimmie has been singing both before and carving her path and career after the show. She has released her latest EP Side A, and while on tour with Before You Exit we had the chance to sit down with her to talk about her latest project. Grimmie also unveiled plans to release a full-length album and her excitement about the forthcoming material and more touring. Check out PopCrush’s full interview with Christina Grimmie below. Talk about your latest release Side A lyrically and musically. Side A was a project that I wanted to do, stuff that I produced completely and it was just stuff that I was dealing with. I haven’t had a lot of “hard times” in my life until recently, so I wanted to write about those things and get them out for my fans and not even worry about genre and just make music. Any plans for Side B ? Yes, I have to complete the Side A with the Side B for sure, not really sure when that’s going to be out. I might want to pursue other projects before I release Side B because I just have so much going on in my brain, like “Is it Side B ? Does it make sense for Side B ?” Honestly Side A is supposed to be a project just from my heart and whatever is happening in my heart at the time and I want Side B to also fit that same thing. Until I go through a Side B, then that’s when I’ll release it. Your decision to go independent, talk about that and how it’s influenced or shaped Side A . Being independent had a lot to do with it for sure. And of course, being on a label maybe I wouldn’t have been able to do that. It was just a lot of emotional things happening for me. For instance, all my fans know about my mom, she has been dealing with cancer for a long time and things have just been going not so great lately, so there was that. There were a lot of other personal issues I was dealing with, friends, boys, whatever so I just wanted to get it all out on one record in four songs. Was that challenging as a writer, to get all of that out in four songs? It was actually free flowing for the most part, with the exception of one song I wrote called “Deception” on Side A . The song took me about a year to write, I started it ages ago and I had a chorus and tried to write the verse for a year, all the verses. I didn’t know why I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t struggling with heavy things until recently, and suddenly I wrote the whole thing in like 20 minutes. This is why you don’t finish a song in a rush. I consider the song my baby because of that. Many people know you from The Voice but you were singing long before that. How have you changed as an artist since the show until now? The show itself, being on it I felt like I grew as a person — just that amount of pressure, no one is under that stress on the norm and it was so weird to be under that, but it was awesome. I would do it again, as nerve-racking as it was. Now, coming off the show, I have so much experience under my belt and so much to go back to — you know I don’t really get nervous for anything anymore, because I remember that feeling and I don’t think anything can top national TV and learning a song in less than a week! I was sculpting myself as I was on the show. You have your mentor which was Adam [Levine] in my case which was great. And that’s all they are, mentors. They help shape you when you don’t know your direction and they’re pulling things out of you, and you’re like “Wow, where’d that come from?” That’s what’s amazing about the show. What does the rest of the year have in store for you? So much awesome new music, I have so much stuff coming up! Right now I’m focusing on writing, I’m pushing Side A for this tour and want to play it for some people. I want to get a full length album out this year. You would be the first that I’d be telling actually, I haven’t really said much about it. With that being said, I definitely want to do that because there’s so much great music being made right now. I’m going to be writing for the next couple of months. I do want to go on another tour, maybe by the end of this year – if I do get an album out this year. If I don’t get an album out this year, crossing my fingers I hope I will, then I would just love to tour that album. If you could choose anyone out there to go on tour with who would it be? Someone like Ariana [Grande] or maybe One Direction , you know, if I had the dream tour. Even [Justin] Bieber . I’d love to open for Bieber it would be awesome, that would definitely be the crowd I would want to play to. Order Side A via iTunes here .

Wal-Mart will close Neighborhood Market stores in East Nashville, Dover Walmart (Photo: Patrick T. Fallon / Bloomberg) Retail behemoth Wal-Mart plans to close five stores in Tennessee this month as part of a broader plan to shutter 269 locations worldwide and focus on the company’s Supercenters and e-commerce business. The Neighborhood Market at 1220 Gallatin Ave. in East Nashville is included in the list of closures, along with “Express” format stores in Chapel Hill, Loretto, Cornersville and a Neighborhood Market in Dover, which is less than 70 miles northwest of Nashville. The stores will close Jan. 28. The Neighborhood Market in East Nashville is a half mile north of ALDI and Kroger stores. It’s about 10 miles north of a Wal-Mart store at 2421 Powell Ave. and about six miles south of the Wal-Mart Supercenter at 3468 Dickerson Pike. Wal-Mart’s exit will leave a retail vacancy in East Nashville at a time when several national grocery chains, including Publix and Whole Foods, are rumored to be circling the local real estate market. The impacted stores represent less than 1 percent of Wal-Mart's global square footage and revenue and were selected based on financial performance and how well the locations align with the company’s long-term plans, the company said in a statement. Wal-Mart has nearly 11,600 stores worldwide. The move represents a shift in focus for the world's largest retailer by revenue, which plans to invest in its e-commerce business, raise wages for entry-level employees and expand in-store pickup for customers' online orders, a service that launched in fall 2015 in the Nashville area. It shows an increased effort on competing with online shopping rival Amazon. See the full list of closures. “Actively managing our portfolio of assets is essential to maintaining a healthy business,” Doug McMillon, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. CEO, said in a statement. “Closing stores is never an easy decision, but it is necessary to keep the company strong and positioned for the future. It’s important to remember that we’ll open well more than 300 stores around the world next year.” The new stores slated to open in the U.S. will include 50 to 60 Supercenters, 85 to 95 Neighborhood Markets and seven to 10 Sam’s Clubs. Wal-Mart's announcement Friday morning comes three months after McMillon told investors the company would evaluate its portfolio to become more nimble. The 269 closures includes 154 U.S. locations and all of the company's 102 Express format stores, which are smaller in size and have been in pilot testing since 2011. Express stores average about 12,000 square feet, compared to Wal-Mart Supercenters at 182,000 square feet and the roughly 38,000-square-foot Neighborhood Markets, which are designed to rival traditional grocery stores. Also covered in the U.S. closures are 23 Neighborhood Markets, 12 Supercenters, seven stores in Puerto Rico, six discount centers and four Sam’s Clubs. More than 95 percent of the U.S. closures are located within an average of 10 miles of another Wal-Mart location. According to the Wal-Mart store locator, there are 43 stores within 50 miles of downtown Nashville. John Berryhill, manager of the family-owned Loretto Cash Saver in Loretto, which is about 100 miles southwest of Nashville, said the store's business was impacted when Wal-Mart opened an Express store about a half mile down the street in late 2014. "I know there will be lots of families affected by people losing their jobs, and I hate to see that," Berryhill said. "We're going to do everything we can to give those people that were shopping (at Wal-Mart) a place to go." The closures will impact about 16,000 employees worldwide, including about 10,000 in the U.S. It's unclear how many employees will be affected by the closures in Tennessee. Wal-Mart said it hopes to place some of those associates in nearby locations. Other associates will receive 60 days of pay, and eligible employees will receive severance, Wal-Mart said. “The decision to close stores is difficult, and we care about the associates who will be impacted,” McMillon said in the statement. “We invested considerable time assessing our stores and clubs and don’t take this lightly. We are supporting those impacted with extra pay and support, and we will take all appropriate steps to ensure they are treated well.” Dover location only a year old The location just east of the Dover city limits was a short-lived experiment. It opened almost exactly one year ago, on Jan. 14, 2015, Highway 79 across from Stewart County High School. Wal-Mart’s arrival in Stewart County was considered a watershed moment, with almost 200 in attendance at a grand opening ceremony that included the Northwest High School ROTC from Clarksville, the Stewart County High School Band and city and county leaders. Checks from the corporation totaling $2,500 in grants were presented to Stewart County schools and local nonprofits. The 12,000-square-foot store employed 25 part-time employees and included a pharmacy, meat counter and gas station. This smaller “Neighborhood Market” concept has expanded quickly in nearby Montgomery County. Three such stores have opened since September 2015 in Clarksville, which already has three Wal-Mart Supercenters. The Stewart Houston Times contributed to this report. Reach Lizzy Alfs at 615-726-5948 and on Twitter @lizzyalfs. Read or Share this story: http://tnne.ws/1UUZy0H

When I wrote earlier this week about the dearth of women on the Conservative front bench during prime minister’s questions, I didn’t think I was being particularly controversial. To me, it was a statement of the obvious that seeing a sea of blokes in dark suits illustrates the absence of female MPs and ministers on the government benches. Judge for yourself about what I said here. What’s surprised me is the torrent of abuse I’ve got for airing what seemed to me perfectly reasonable views. 519 comments and counting, many articulating (if that’s not over-dignifying the kind of vitriol hurled at me) the kind of views I’d assumed had gone out of style in the last century. Here’s a few to amuse you. “Warmingmyth” opined: “If Cathy Newman is an example of the type of woman that is being suggested, then we need less women not more or indeed perhaps we need none at all.” “Petrovitch” fumed: “The rightful place for a woman is… wait for it… having babies and looking after the family. Whatever some women would prefer is irrelevant here, it is undeniable that women are designed to have babies.” “Colliemore” struck a similarly reproductive note. “At least there are no wimmin frontbenchers been shown breastfeeding their baybeez, as no doubt they would demand their sacred right to do so,” s/he spat. “Corimmobile” got personal: “As for Cathy Newman I would say that she has achieved an overly high station in life when compared with her obvious gender prejudice and apparent lack of intellect.” As did “Aethelflaed”: “Cathy Newman, as a woman, I have nothing but the deepest contempt for women like you, who think the best interests of society are served by elevating incompetence just because it wears a skirt.” And “allchange”: “Cathy, you’re not bad looking – that’s why you read the news. Best leave the real journalism to professionals, be they male or female.” Of course, you’ll notice immediately that none of these “commentators” used their real name. Which seems to me the root of the problem. If you can’t put your name to a comment, don’t make it. If you’re writing something you wouldn’t say to my face, don’t write it. I don’t always look “below the line” at the comments, but after Jon Snow tweeted outrage (see below) at the views expressed on one of my previous blogs, I thought I’d check them out. Fortunately I’ve got a thick skin, so the abuse doesn’t trouble me personally. It’s not that I mind criticism, and I’d actively encourage a difference of views and a healthy debate. A distressingly foul thread of responses to Cathy Newman’s blog in the Telegraph re leaving Sally Bercow alone. Ms Newman has it right — Jon Snow (@jonsnowC4) February 5, 2014 But as a professional woman I find it somewhat disturbing this kind of sexist abuse remains so prevalent. As a social being, I like to converse with people who want to converse with me. I’m often asking people on Twitter what they think about issues we’re covering on the news. And I try and respond to as many tweets as time allows. If you’ve got something to say, please tweet me on @cathynewman. And be warned, I block people who are personally abusive. Follow @CathyNewman on Twitter

According to a disclosure report, the MPAA spent $400,000 lobbying a wide range of US government departments in the first quarter of 2011 including the FBI, Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, ICE and the Vice President's Office. Issues on the table include so-called "rogue sites" including RapidShare, streaming, graduated response (3 strikes) and domain seizures. In its quest to stamp out piracy, the MPAA continues to pump money into its lobbying activities in the hope of planting the seeds of legislative change. While the debate over whether corporations should be allowed to lobby crime-fighting organizations such as the police and FBI will rage on, at least there is an enforced level of transparency which allows the public to see where lobbyists are spending their money. The MPAA have just made their mandatory disclosure for the first quarter of 2011 and it makes interesting reading. In total the member companies of the MPAA – Disney, Sony, Warner Bros., Paramount, 20th Century Fox and Universal – spent $400,000 in the first three months of the year lobbying influential government departments. These included the office of Vice-President Joe Biden, a valuable MPAA ally in 2010 with his mantra of “Piracy Is Theft, Clean and Simple.” In the filing, which covers the period from January 1st to March 31st, several government departments are listed repeatedly including the U.S Senate, House of Representatives, Homeland Security, Dept. of Justice, FBI, ICE, U.S. Copyright Office and U.S. Trade Representative. On the back of moves to turn the activity into a felony, it’s no surprise that streaming illegal content featured heavily in the MPAA’s 1st quarter lobbying. Considering the huge effort already underway with domain seizures, many of them streaming-related, Operation in Our Sites remained firmly on the agenda. Also listed is the issue of “Pay processors role in IP enforcement”, a reference to the developing strategy of strangling the revenue to sites that the MPAA believe are generating income from infringement. In November 2010, file-hosting service RapidShare was among the first Internet services to be labelled by both the MPAA and RIAA as a so-called “Rogue Site”, a move which forced the cyberlocker service to initiate lobbying of its own. In 2011 it is evident that Hollywood is continuing to pressure on the Swiss-based company. RapidShare is mentioned several times in the MPAA disclosure report under several headings, not least ‘Rogue Site Legislation’ and ‘Law Enforcement/Crime and Criminal Justice’. Interestingly, ‘Graduated Response’ is also listed as a lobbying subject, although the U.S. appeared to rule out so-called “3 strikes” regimes earlier this month in response to a United Nations report. On the educational front, the MPAA is keen to drive home the anti-P2P message to the country’s schools and universities. Equally it is pushing for anti-camcording activities in the Asia-Pacific region plus awareness of counterfeit movie usage at US military bases, a subject we’ve touched on previously. The MPAA also discussed the anti-piracy company MiMTiD. A DMCA-related controversy connected to that company was covered by TechDirt in February. The $400,000 spent by the MPAA in the first 3 months of 2011 represents a $30,000 uplift on the same period last year and a $60,000 increase on its spend during the final quarter of 2010.

This week, Brunei made waves across Southeast Asia when Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah announced that he would move his nation towards implementing Islamic Sharia law into its national penal code. The Sultan has ruled Brunei since 1967 and possesses absolute executive authority as head of state. While Sharia had previously existed in Brunei in the form of an Islamic court, its role was mainly restricted to dealing with family law and disputes. The recent announcement is expected to take Brunei's legal system, at least for its Muslim population, in a direction similar to Saudi Arabia's penal code. According to USA Today, at a legal conference in Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei’s capital, the Sultan said that the new Sharia penal code "should be regarded as a form of 'special guidance' from God and would be 'part of the great history' of Brunei.” Notably, the new penal code will only be applicable to Muslims–about two-thirds of Brunei’s 420,000 residents. Under the new penal code, violators will be subject to brutal capital punishment including having their limbs severed for theft and stoning for adulterers. The shift towards strict Sharia represents another step in the increasing Islamization of the small Southeast Asian nation. According to the BBC, "The sultan had already made religious education compulsory for Muslim children and ordered businesses to close during Friday prayers.” The move has already come under criticism from Western human rights groups. Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said that "Brunei is showing its feudal characteristics as an 18th-century state rather than an important member of a regional Southeast Asian economic and social consensus in the 21st century.” Brunei will become the first and only eastern Asian country to implement such strict Sharia law at the national level. Brunei’s neighbors, Malaysia and Indonesia, implement Sharia law to a lesser degree, using it to regulate personal matters like custody rights and marriage–similar to Brunei’s previous stance. Malaysia’s Terengannu province, and Indonesia’s Aceh province have however implemented Sharia in full. One noted Bruneian scholar of Islamic law, Mufti Awang Abdul Aziz, defended the new penal code: "Let us not just look at the hand-cutting or the stoning or the caning per se, but let us also look at the conditions governing them," he said. "It is not indiscriminate cutting or stoning or caning. There are conditions and there are methods that are just and fair.” Still, there are concerns among some that this decision might negatively impact the tourist industry in Brunei. Despite the Sultan’s efforts to strengthen the role of Islam in Bruneian life, some commentators have suggested that such strict Sharia law may be in conflict with Malay culture, and Brunei’s peaceful nature. Brunei, officially known as the Nation of Brunei, the Abode of Peace, might find itself hard-pressed to retain that moniker with its foray into such a draconian legal system. Ankit Panda is Associate Editor of The Diplomat. You can follow him on Twitter @nktpnd.

The Laffertys were formerly members of a very small splinter group called the School of Prophets, led by Robert C. Crossfield (also known by his prophet name Onias). The group accepts many beliefs of the original LDS church at the time when it ceased the practice of polygamy in the 1890s, but it does not identify with those who call themselves fundamentalist Mormons . The book examines the ideologies of both the LDS Church and the fundamentalist Mormons polygamous groups, such as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS Church). Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith is a nonfiction book by best-selling author Jon Krakauer , first published in July 2003. He investigated and juxtaposed two histories: the origin and evolution of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), and a modern double murder committed in the name of God by brothers Ron and Dan Lafferty, who subscribed to a fundamentalist version of Mormonism . Murders Edit The book opens with news accounts of the 1984 murder of Brenda Lafferty and her infant daughter Erica. Brenda was married to Allen Lafferty, the youngest of the Lafferty brothers. His older brothers Dan and Ron disapproved of their sister-in-law Brenda because they believed she was the reason Ron's wife left him (after refusing to allow him to marry a plural/second wife). Both men's extremism reached new heights when they became members of the School of the Prophets, founded and led by Robert C. Crossfield. After joining this group, Ron claimed that God had sent him revelations about Brenda. Communication with God is a core belief of fundamentalist Mormonism, as well as the mainstream LDS Church.[1] Ron showed the members of the School of Prophets a written "removal revelation" that allegedly called for the killing of Brenda and her baby. After other members of the School failed to honor Ron's removal revelation, the brothers quit the School. Dan claimed that he slit both of the victims' throats. But, at the 2001 trial, Chip Carnes, who was riding in the getaway car, testified that Ron said that he had killed Brenda,[2] and that Ron had thanked his brother for "doing the baby." After the murders, the police found the written "revelation" concerning Brenda and Erica. The press widely reported that Ron had received a revelation to kill the mother and child. Afterward, the Lafferty brothers conducted a recorded press conference at which Ron said that the "revelation" was not addressed to him, but to "Todd" [a drifter whom Ron had befriended while working in Wichita, Kansas] and that the revelation called only for "removal" of Brenda and her baby, and did not use the word "kill." The jury at Ron's trial was shown these remarks of Ron denying he had received a revelation to kill Brenda and Erica.[3] Mormon history Edit After opening with the Lafferty case, Krakauer explores the history of Mormonism, starting with the early life of Joseph Smith, founder and first prophet of the Latter Day Saint movement. He follows his life from a criminal fraud trial to leading the first followers to Jackson County, Missouri, and Nauvoo, Illinois. While violence seemed to accompany the Mormons, Krakauer notes that they did not necessarily initiate it. Early Mormons faced severe religious persecution from mainstream Protestant Christians, due to their unorthodox beliefs, including polygamy. In addition they tended to conduct business and personal relations only with other Mormons. There were violent clashes between Mormons and non-Mormons, culminating in Smith's death on June 27, 1844. A mob shot him, pulling him from jail in Carthage, Illinois, where he was awaiting trial for destroying the printing press of a local publication that had portrayed him negatively. From Nauvoo, the Mormons trekked westward to modern-day Utah, led by Smith's successor Brigham Young (after some controversy). Arriving in what they called Deseret, many Mormons believed they would be left alone by the United States government, as the territory was then part of Mexico. Soon after their arrival, the Mexican–American War occurred, with Mexico's eventual defeat. Under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo signed on February 2, 1848, this land, California and the Southwest were ceded to the United States. Smith's highly controversial revelation of plural marriage threatened to split apart followers of the faith. The Utah Territory was a theocracy ruled by Brigham Young, and Utah was denied statehood for 50 years due to the Mormons' practice of polygamy. Finally, on September 23, 1890, Wilford Woodruff, the fourth president of LDS Church, officially banned the practice of polygamy after having received a revelation from God. Six years later, Utah was granted statehood.[4] After the Woodruff Manifesto, some members broke away from the mainstream church to form what eventually became the FLDS Church, the most popular group of fundamentalist Mormonism. The FLDS Church encourages polygamy, as do some other breakaway groups. Comparisons Edit Krakauer examines events in Latter Day Saint history and compares them to modern-day FLDS doctrine (and other minority versions of Mormonism, such as the Crossfield School of the Prophets). He examines the 1857 Mountain Meadows massacre during the Utah War, in which Mormons and some local Paiute Indians rounded up and murdered approximately 120 members of the Baker–Fancher party of emigrants passing through their territory. The Mormons went to great lengths to conceal their part in the massacre (including dressing as the Paiute and painting their faces in similar fashion). The Civil War interrupted investigations of the events, and no one was indicted until 1874, when nine men were charged. For nearly two decades the falsehood held that the massacre was due solely to the Paiute. The only person ever convicted in the affair was John D. Lee, a member of the LDS Church. He was convicted and executed by the state in 1877 for his role in the crime. Krakauer cites information gleaned from several interviews with Dan Lafferty and former and current members of the Crossfield School of the Prophets, as well as other fundamentalist Mormons. He refers to several histories about the formation of Mormonism to tie the origins of the religion to the modern iterations of both the church and the fundamentalists.[5]

While Iconic Masters isn't out yet, I just wanted to get my hands dirty. Simulating drafts isn't the best, but it can be fine for Pack 1, Pick 1 evaluations. So let's take a look at a couple of packs! The Pack: The Pick: While is a pretty spicy rare, I don't actually think the card is going to be very good. Sure, there's a deck built around lifegain, but if you have 30 life, you're probably already winning. And the floor of is just too low. is a solid card. We all remember how good was, and this doesn't require any Deserts, but it does require an additional blue mana. While the card is solid, I think both of the other blue cards in this pack are better. In a Masters set, many of the creatures provide additional value, and removal tends to be worse for this reason. I think is one of the top commons in the set. It's efficient and will really help both the control and tempo decks. I think I would be happy to first-pick the card, and that's pretty much all there is to it! But there is one other card that may edge out the cheap counterspell. is a really interesting card, but it's hard to tell how good it'll be. Sure, casting it on Turn 3 along with a is going to be very good, but how often will the Angel be stuck in your hand? For now I'm going to assume that there's a good amount of support and that is pretty much an that you can occasionally cast on Turn 3 or 4, which is a pretty great card. I wouldn't be surprised if is better, but for now, I'll start off by taking the Angel. Pack 1, Pick 1 The Pack: The Pick: My Take!

After a century of separation, this herd of wild bison has finally returned home to the Banff National Park in Alberta. Bison used to roam through the park’s Eastern slopes during the early 1900’s, but human interference almost wiped out the local species entirely. The Canadian government saved the herd in a multi-million dollar buyout and relocated the animals to Elk Island National Park for conservation purposes. But now, a group of 16 bison – several of which are pregnant – have been brought home as part of a five year plan to repopulate the area. RELATED: Manatee Population Has Rebounded 500 Percent, No Longer Endangered Since bison were historically the dominant grazing species of Banff, the return of the herd will provide healthy diversity for the local ecosystem. The herd is currently being closely monitored by Parks Canada within a carefully restricted zone. In June 2018, the bison will be allowed a much more expanded space to roam. The reintroduction program is taking these steps slowly so as to ensure a smooth transition for the species, the ecosystem, and surrounding property. “Restoring wild bison … is the righting of wrong that was caused in the 19th century when we almost eliminated wild bison as a species.… Banff Park was involved in saving the species from extinction 100 years ago, and today it’s involved in restoring this species as part of the landscape, as a wild animal, and that is really exciting,” conservationist Harvey Locke told CBC. (WATCH the video below) Click To Share This Historic Story With Your Friends (Photo by Parks Canada)

Posted on Feb 5, 2013 12:00am When HPD officer Ben Keoki is shot by a sniper in broad daylight, Five-0 joins the case to hunt for the mystery killer. A specialized bullet casing is found near the sniper's nest with the victim's name engraved on it, leading McGarrett to posit that this is just the first of many killings by the gunman. Later, an anonymous tip draws HPD and Five-0 to a home where a drug dealer is holed up and engaging in a firefight with the police. During the firefight, another officer, Troy Ookala, is gunned down, hit by the same sniper. It becomes clear that the sniper is targeting police officers, so Five-0 works to figure out what Ookala and Keoki had in common. Things take a dark turn when McGarrett narrowly misses getting shot by the sniper himself, and then Sgt. Lukela gets shot as well. McGarrett and Danny manage to chase the sniper and force his car into the ocean, but he gets away before they can arrest him. They recover a prosthetic hand at the scene, which allows McGarrett to put the puzzle pieces together. McGarrett's father, Lukela, Keoki, and Ookala were all awarded medals for stopping an armed bank robbery years ago, and the perpetrator of that robbery had his hands blown off by his own explosives in the gunfight at the bank. That man, Curt Stoner, (the 'Hookman') was given two prosthetic hands in prison, and he vowed to get revenge on the men who put him there. Five-0 manages to lure Stoner out, using McGarrett as live bait, and Kono takes him out with a perfect shot of her own.

The Brewers Association, the national non-profit association on behalf of the majority of today’s U.S. breweries, and publishers of CraftBeer.com, celebrate the culmination of these events each May with American Craft Beer Week (ACBW), The Mother of All Beer Weeks. A chance to introduce Beer Lovers to some of the finest new brews in the country! American Craft Beer Week Coming May 2018 One of our two favorite weeks of the year! (the other week is Zwanze in September). This week we celebrate all things made by American Craft Brewers. Each night during the week has a theme, as we try explore and dig deep into our favorite styles. Then on Saturday we have a Grand Tasting, where we open up every American Craft bottle in the house and turn over all our drafts to American Craft Beer! There will be tasting tickets for most nights and for the Grand Tasting, but most drafts will also be sold a la carte. If you can’t come on a particular night, keep a sharp eye on our social media as many of these beers will go on a day or two prior to their event day and some will reappear for the Grand Tasting. STAY TUNED…better yet, join our email list for the latest news!

Tilda Swinton has posed with a rainbow flag in front of Saint Basil's Cathedral in Red Square, Moscow, near the Kremlin. The actress's representative Christian Hodell urged people to share the image of the actress waving the gay pride symbol. "Please share this message from Tilda: 'In solidarity. From Russia with love'," said Hodell. The rainbow flag was popularised as a symbol of LGBT pride by San Francisco artist Gilbert Baker in 1978. Despite the decriminalisation of male homosexual acts in Russia in 1993, there have been increasing restrictions on gay rights in recent years. Moscow's top court has ruled that no gay pride parade may be held in the capital for 100 years, while a bill to ban the distribution of "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations" to minors is currently going through parliament. Last month, Google and burger chain The Diner used the rainbow symbol to celebrate Gay Pride week.

The suspect had a financial dispute with 30-year-old Carrie Melvin, the LAPD told The Hollywood Reporter. Ezeoma Obioha was arrested around 7:15 p.m. Friday for the July 5 murder of Carrie Jean Melvin, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed. The 31-year-old male is being held at the Los Angeles downtown detention center on $1 million bail, officer Liliana Preciado told THR. Obioha had a financial dispute with 30-year-old Melvin, who formerly worked as a production assistant in Hollywood and was pursuing a career in the entertainment industry. She moved from Morro Bay, California to Los Angeles in 2011. Obioha shot her in the back of the head with a shotgun while she was walking with her boyfriend, who was unharmed, from her apartment on McCadden Place, close to Highland Avenue, toward a Sunset Boulevard restaurant. She was pronounced dead at the scene. Authorities said the man walked up to Melvin and shot her in the head before getting into a car and fleeing. According to Melvin's LinkedIn profile, she became CEO of a social media management company in June. "Everyone you talked to just loved her," Melvin's father told the Los Angeles Times. "She was a joy to be around. When she looked at you, you felt like you were in the spotlight." Obioha's case will be presented to the district attorney on July 28. More to come...

Press Releases Rescue Chocolate Press Release Receive press releases from Rescue Chocolate: By Email RSS Feeds: Farm Animals to Benefit from Rescue Chocolate Sales in October Brooklyn, NY, September 27, 2012 --( The answer is a qualified yes, as Farm Animal Rights Movement (FARM) will be the Rescue Chocolate beneficiary for October 2012. The dark chocolate company, whose products are only for human consumption, selects a different animal rescue organization to receive its profits each month. Past beneficiaries have included Shelby County Animal Shelter, NYC Rescue Kitties, and Danbury Animal Welfare Society. Rescue Chocolate founder Sarah Gross said most of the groups she partners with are concerned with finding adoptive caretakers for homeless dogs and cats. “But every now and then we like to branch out to other needy animals,” she said. “We have worked with bird groups, rabbit groups, even a rodent group. Now we want to focus on the farm.” FARM is a national nonprofit working to end the use of animals for food through public education and grassroots activism. Founded in 1981, the group organizes conferences, provides materials for those considering a vegan lifestyle, and supports programs such as Choice School Lunch and the Gentle Thanksgiving. It is headquartered in the Washington, DC area. Rescue Chocolate is a Brooklyn, NY-based company. In addition to chocolate bars, the company vends truffles, tee shirts, leashes, and animal care books. All of its food products, in addition to being vegan, are kosher, handcrafted, and packaged in eco-friendly materials. The cacao is organic and fair-trade certified. Each chocolate bar flavor is named after an issue important in the animal rescue world. For example, there are Peanut Butter Pit Bull bars (advocating against breed-specific legislation), Foster-iffic Peppermint bars (suggesting that people provide foster homes for animals in municipal shelters), and a pure dark chocolate bar named The Fix (urging people to spay or neuter their dogs and cats). For more information or to order products benefiting FARM, visit www.RescueChocolate.com. For further information about FARM, go to www.farmusa.org. Brooklyn, NY, September 27, 2012 --( PR.com )-- Can chocolate benefit farm animals?The answer is a qualified yes, as Farm Animal Rights Movement (FARM) will be the Rescue Chocolate beneficiary for October 2012.The dark chocolate company, whose products are only for human consumption, selects a different animal rescue organization to receive its profits each month. Past beneficiaries have included Shelby County Animal Shelter, NYC Rescue Kitties, and Danbury Animal Welfare Society.Rescue Chocolate founder Sarah Gross said most of the groups she partners with are concerned with finding adoptive caretakers for homeless dogs and cats. “But every now and then we like to branch out to other needy animals,” she said. “We have worked with bird groups, rabbit groups, even a rodent group. Now we want to focus on the farm.”FARM is a national nonprofit working to end the use of animals for food through public education and grassroots activism. Founded in 1981, the group organizes conferences, provides materials for those considering a vegan lifestyle, and supports programs such as Choice School Lunch and the Gentle Thanksgiving. It is headquartered in the Washington, DC area.Rescue Chocolate is a Brooklyn, NY-based company. In addition to chocolate bars, the company vends truffles, tee shirts, leashes, and animal care books. All of its food products, in addition to being vegan, are kosher, handcrafted, and packaged in eco-friendly materials. The cacao is organic and fair-trade certified.Each chocolate bar flavor is named after an issue important in the animal rescue world. For example, there are Peanut Butter Pit Bull bars (advocating against breed-specific legislation), Foster-iffic Peppermint bars (suggesting that people provide foster homes for animals in municipal shelters), and a pure dark chocolate bar named The Fix (urging people to spay or neuter their dogs and cats).For more information or to order products benefiting FARM, visit www.RescueChocolate.com. For further information about FARM, go to www.farmusa.org. Contact Information Rescue Chocolate Sarah Gross 917 767 7283 www.rescuechocolate.com Click here to view the list of recent Press Releases from Rescue Chocolate

Here is the full list of nominations for the 21st annual SAG Awards, which were announced this morning at LA’s Pacific Design Center. Fox Searchlight topped the film studios with six nominations, led by Alexander Gonzales Inarritu’s Birdman, which nabbed four total nominations: for Outstanding Cast, which is the closest thing the guild has to a Best Picture category; and for star Michael Keaton and supporting actors Edward Norton and Emma Stone. It was joined in the top cast category by IFC Films’ Boyhood, which also got nods for its co-stars Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette; Searchlight’s Wes Anderson pic The Grand Budapest Hotel; the Weinstein Co’s The Imitation Game; and Focus Features’ The Theory Of Everything. The latter two biopics landed lead noms for Benedict Cumberbatch, Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones. On The TV side, HBO led all networks with 14 noms, thanks to multiple acting mentions for The Normal Heart and Olive Kitteridge as well as series True Detective (nabbing noms for both Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson), Veep and Boardwalk Empire. ABC’s Modern Family will try for a record fifth ensemble win as it landed a spot in that category as well as for leads Julie Bowen, Ty Burrell and Eric Stonestreet. Among the notable first-time nominees is Jennifer Aniston for her indie Cake, which is getting an awards push from newbie distributor Cinelou, and Orphan Black‘s character-morphing star Tatiana Maslany, who made the cut in a rare and killer six-person category that includes Homeland‘s Claire Danes, How To Get Away With Murder‘s Viola Davis, The Good Wife‘s Julianna Margulies, Downton Abbey‘s Maggie Smith and House Of Cards‘ Robin Wright. The SAG Awards will be handed out Sunday, January 25 at the Shrine Auditorium in LA in a ceremony airing live on TNT and TBS. Stay tuned for analysis from Deadline’s Awards Columnist Pete Hammond and Editor-in-Chief/TV Nellie Andreeva. Here’s the full list: 21st ANNUAL SCREEN ACTORS GUILD AWARDS NOMINATIONS THEATRICAL MOTION PICTURES Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role STEVE CARELL / John du Pont – “FOXCATCHER” (Sony Pictures Classics) BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH / Alan Turing – “THE IMITATION GAME” (The Weinstein Company) JAKE GYLLENHAAL / Louis Bloom – “NIGHTCRAWLER” (Open Road Films) MICHAEL KEATON / Riggan – “BIRDMAN” (Fox Searchlight Pictures) EDDIE REDMAYNE / Stephen Hawking – “THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING” (Focus Features) Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role JENNIFER ANISTON / Claire Bennett – “CAKE” (Cinelou Films) FELICITY JONES / Jane Hawking – “THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING” (Focus Features) JULIANNE MOORE / Alice Howland – “STILL ALICE” (Sony Pictures Classics) ROSAMUND PIKE / Amy Dunne – “GONE GIRL” (20th Century Fox) REESE WITHERSPOON / Cheryl Strayed – “WILD” (Fox Searchlight Pictures) Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role ROBERT DUVALL / Joseph Palmer – “THE JUDGE” (Warner Bros. Pictures) ETHAN HAWKE / Mason, Sr. – “BOYHOOD” (IFC Films) EDWARD NORTON / Mike – “BIRDMAN” (Fox Searchlight Pictures) MARK RUFFALO / Dave Schultz – “FOXCATCHER” (Sony Pictures Classics) J.K. SIMMONS / Fletcher – “WHIPLASH” (Sony Pictures Classics) Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role PATRICIA ARQUETTE / Olivia – “BOYHOOD” (IFC Films) KEIRA KNIGHTLEY / Joan Clarke – “THE IMITATION GAME” (The Weinstein Company) EMMA STONE / Sam – “BIRDMAN” (Fox Searchlight Pictures) MERYL STREEP / The Witch – “INTO THE WOODS” (Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures) NAOMI WATTS / Daka – “ST. VINCENT” (The Weinstein Company) Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture BIRDMAN (Fox Searchlight Pictures) ZACH GALIFIANAKIS / Jake MICHAEL KEATON / Riggan EDWARD NORTON / Mike ANDREA RISEBOROUGH / Laura AMY RYAN / Sylvia EMMA STONE / Sam NAOMI WATTS / Lesley BOYHOOD (IFC Films) PATRICIA ARQUETTE / Olivia ELLAR COLTRANE / Mason ETHAN HAWKE / Mason, Sr. LORELEI LINKLATER / Samantha THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL (Fox Searchlight Pictures) F. MURRAY ABRAHAM / Mr. Moustafa MATHIEU AMALRIC / Serge X. ADRIEN BRODY / Dmitri WILLEM DAFOE / Jopling RALPH FIENNES / M. Gustave JEFF GOLDBLUM / Dep. Kovacs HARVEY KEITEL / Ludwig JUDE LAW / Young Writer BILL MURRAY / M. Ivan EDWARD NORTON / Henckels TONY REVOLORI / Zero SAOIRSE RONAN / Agatha JASON SCHWARTZMAN / M. Jean LÉA SEYDOUX / Clotilde TILDA SWINTON / Madame D TOM WILKINSON / Author OWEN WILSON / M. Chuck THE IMITATION GAME (The Weinstein Company) MATTHEW BEARD / Peter Hilton BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH / Alan Turing CHARLES DANCE / Commander Denniston MATTHEW GOODE / Hugh Alexander RORY KINNEAR / Nock KEIRA KNIGHTLEY / Joan Clarke ALLEN LEECH / John Cairncross MARK STRONG / Stewart Menzies THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING (Focus Features) CHARLIE COX / Jonathan Hellyer Jones FELICITY JONES / Jane Hawking SIMON McBURNEY / Frank Hawking EDDIE REDMAYNE / Stephen Hawking DAVID THEWLIS / Dennis Sciama EMILY WATSON / Beryl Wilde TELEVISION PROGRAMS Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Television Movie or Miniseries ADRIEN BRODY / Harry Houdini – “HOUDINI” (History) BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH / Sherlock Holmes – “SHERLOCK: HIS LAST VOW” (PBS) RICHARD JENKINS / Henry Kitteridge – “OLIVE KITTERIDGE” (HBO) MARK RUFFALO / Ned Weeks – “THE NORMAL HEART” (HBO) BILLY BOB THORNTON / Lorne Malvo – “FARGO” (FX) Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Television Movie or Miniseries ELLEN BURSTYN / Olivia Foxworth – “FLOWERS IN THE ATTIC” (Lifetime) MAGGIE GYLLENHAAL / Nessa Stein – “THE HONORABLE WOMAN” (SundanceTV) FRANCES McDORMAND / Olive Kitteridge – “OLIVE KITTERIDGE” (HBO) JULIA ROBERTS / Dr. Emma Brookner – “THE NORMAL HEART” (HBO) CICELY TYSON / Carrie Watts – “THE TRIP TO BOUNTIFUL” (Lifetime) Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Drama Series STEVE BUSCEMI / Enoch “Nucky” Thompson – “BOARDWALK EMPIRE” (HBO) PETER DINKLAGE / Tyrion Lannister – “GAME OF THRONES” (HBO) WOODY HARRELSON / Martin Hart – “TRUE DETECTIVE” (HBO) MATTHEW McCONAUGHEY / Rust Cohle – “TRUE DETECTIVE” (HBO) KEVIN SPACEY / Francis Underwood – “HOUSE OF CARDS” (Netflix) Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Drama Series (6 nominees) CLAIRE DANES / Carrie Mathison – “HOMELAND” (Showtime) VIOLA DAVIS / Annalise Keating – “HOW TO GET AWAY WITH MURDER” (ABC) JULIANNA MARGULIES / Alicia Florrick – “THE GOOD WIFE” (CBS) TATIANA MASLANY / Sarah/Cosima/Alison/Rachel/Helena/Tony/Jennifer and Various Others – “ORPHAN BLACK” (BBC America) MAGGIE SMITH / Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham – “DOWNTON ABBEY” (PBS) ROBIN WRIGHT / Claire Underwood – “HOUSE OF CARDS” (Netflix) Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Comedy Series TY BURRELL / Phil Dunphy – “MODERN FAMILY ” (ABC) LOUIS C.K. / Louie – “LOUIE” (FX) WILLIAM H. MACY / Frank Gallagher – “SHAMELESS” (Showtime) JIM PARSONS / Sheldon Cooper – “THE BIG BANG THEORY” (CBS) ERIC STONESTREET / Cameron Tucker – “MODERN FAMILY” (ABC) Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Comedy Series UZO ADUBA / Suzanne “Crazy Eyes” Warren – “ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK” (Netflix) JULIE BOWEN / Claire Dunphy – “MODERN FAMILY” (ABC) EDIE FALCO / Jackie Peyton – “NURSE JACKIE” (Showtime) JULIA LOUIS-DREYFUS / Vice President Selina Meyer – “VEEP” (HBO) AMY POEHLER / Leslie Knope – “PARKS AND RECREATION” (NBC) Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series BOARDWALK EMPIRE (HBO) STEVE BUSCEMI / Enoch “Nucky” Thompson PAUL CALDERON / Arquimedes NICHOLAS CALHOUN / Sean LOUIS CANCELMI / Mike D’Angelo JOHN ELLISON CONLEE / Commodore MICHAEL COUNTRYMAN / Frank Wilson STEPHEN GRAHAM / Al Capone DOMENICK LOMBARDOZZI / Ralph Capone NOLAN LYONS / Enoch Thompson (young) KELLY MACDONALD / Margaret Thompson BORIS McGIVER / Sheriff Smith Johnson VINCENT PIAZZA / Charlie “Lucky” Luciano PAUL SPARKS / Mickey Doyle TRAVIS TOPE / Joe Hardy SHEA WHIGHAM / Eli Thompson ANATOL YUSEF / Meyer Lansky MICHAEL ZEGEN / Benny Siegel DOWNTON ABBEY (PBS) HUGH BONNEVILLE / Robert, Earl of Grantham LAURA CARMICHAEL / Lady Edith Crawley JIM CARTER / Mr. Carson BRENDAN COYLE / Mr. Bates MICHELLE DOCKERY / Lady Mary Crawley KEVIN DOYLE / Mr. Molesley JOANNE FROGGATT / Anna Bates LILY JAMES / Lady Rose ROBERT JAMES-COLLIER / Thomas Barrow ALLEN LEECH / Tom Branson PHYLLIS LOGAN / Mrs. Hughes ELIZABETH McGOVERN / Cora, Countess of Grantham SOPHIE McSHERA / Daisy MATT MILNE / Alfred LESLEY NICOL / Mrs. Patmore DAVID ROBB / Dr. Clarkson MAGGIE SMITH / Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham ED SPELEERS / Jimmy Kent CARA THEOBOLD / Ivy PENELOPE WILTON / Isobel Crawley GAME OF THRONES (HBO) JOSEF ALTIN / Pyp JACOB ANDERSON / Grey Worm JOHN BRADLEY / Samwell Tarly DOMINIC CARTER / Janos Slynt GWENDOLINE CHRISTIE / Brienne of Tarth EMILIA CLARKE / Daenerys Targaryen NIKOLAJ COSTER-WALDAU / Jaime Lannister BEN CROMPTON / Dolorous Edd CHARLES DANCE / Tywin Lannister PETER DINKLAGE / Tyrion Lannister NATALIE DORMER / Margaery Tyrell NATHALIE EMMANUEL / Missandei IAIN GLEN / Ser Jorah Mormont JULIAN GLOVER / Pycelle KIT HARINGTON / Jon Snow LENA HEADEY / Cersei Lannister CONLETH HILL / Varys RORY McCANN / Sandor “The Hound” Clegane IAN McELHINNEY / Ser Barristan Selmy PEDRO PASCAL / Oberyn Martell DANIEL PORTMAN / Podrick Payne MARK STANLEY / Grenn SOPHIE TURNER / Sansa Stark MAISIE WILLIAMS / Arya Stark HOMELAND (Showtime) NUMAN ACAR / Hassan Haqqani NAZANIN BONIADI / Fara Sherazi CLAIRE DANES / Carrie Mathison RUPERT FRIEND / Peter Quinn RAZA JAFFREY / Aasar Khan NIMRAT KAUR / Tasneem Qureishi TRACY LETTS / Sen. Andrew Lockhart MARK MOSES / Dennis Boyd MICHAEL O’KEEFE / John Redmond MANDY PATINKIN / Saul Berenson LAILA ROBINS / Martha Boyd MAURY STERLING / Max HOUSE OF CARDS (Netflix) MAHERSHALA ALI / Remy Danton JAYNE ATKINSON / Catherine Durant RACHEL BROSNAHAN / Rachel Posner DEREK CECIL / Seth Grayson NATHAN DARROW / Edward Meechum MICHEL GILL / President Walker JOANNA GOING / Tricia Walker SAKINA JAFFREY / Linda Vasquez MICHAEL KELLY / Doug Stamper MOZHAN MARNÒ / Ayla Sayyad GERALD McRANEY / Raymond Tusk MOLLY PARKER / Jackie Sharp JIMMI SIMPSON / Gavin Orsay KEVIN SPACEY / Francis Underwood ROBIN WRIGHT / Claire Underwood Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series THE BIG BANG THEORY (CBS) MAYIM BIALIK / Amy Farrah Fowler KALEY CUOCO-SWEETING / Penny JOHNNY GALECKI / Leonard Hofstadter SIMON HELBERG / Howard Wolowitz KUNAL NAYYAR / Rajesh Koothrappali JIM PARSONS / Sheldon Cooper MELISSA RAUCH / Bernadette Rostenkowski-Wolowitz BROOKLYN NINE-NINE (FOX) STEPHANIE BEATRIZ / Det. Rosa Diaz DIRK BLOCKER / Hitchcock ANDRE BRAUGHER / Capt. Ray Holt TERRY CREWS / Sgt. Terry Jeffords MELISSA FUMERO / Det. Amy Santiago JOE LO TRUGLIO / Det. Charles Boyle JOEL McKINNON MILLER / Scully CHELSEA PERETTI / Gina Linetti ANDY SAMBERG / Det. Jake Peralta MODERN FAMILY (ABC) AUBREY ANDERSON EMMONS / Lily Tucker-Pritchett JULIE BOWEN / Claire Dunphy TY BURRELL / Phil Dunphy JESSE TYLER FERGUSON / Mitchell Pritchett NOLAN GOULD / Luke Dunphy SARAH HYLAND / Haley Dunphy ED O’NEILL / Jay Pritchett RICO RODRIGUEZ / Manny Delgado ERIC STONESTREET / Cameron Tucker SOFIA VERGARA / Gloria Delgado-Pritchett ARIEL WINTER / Alex Dunphy ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK (Netflix) UZO ADUBA / Suzanne “Crazy Eyes” Warren JASON BIGGS / Larry Bloom DANIELLE BROOKS / Tasha “Taystee” Jefferson LAVERNE COX / Sophia Burset JACKIE CRUZ / Flaca CATHERINE CURTIN / Wanda Bell LEA DELARIA / Carrie “Big Boo” Black BETH FOWLER / Sister Ingalls YVETTE FREEMAN / Irma GERMAR TERRELL GARDNER / Charles Ford KIMIKO GLENN / Brook Soso ANNIE GOLDEN / Norma Romano DIANE GUERRERO / Maritza Ramos MICHAEL J. HARNEY / Ofc. Sam Healy VICKY JEUDY / Janae Watson JULIE LAKE / Angie Rice LAUREN LAPKUS / Susan Fischer SELENIS LEYVA / Gloria Mendoza NATASHA LYONNE / Nicky Nichols TARYN MANNING / Tiffany “Pennsatucky” Doggett JOEL MARSH GARLAND / Scott O’Neill MATT McGORRY / Ofc. John Bennett ADRIENNE C. MOORE / Black Cindy KATE MULGREW / Galina “Red” Reznikov EMMA MYLES / Leanne Taylor JESSICA PIMENTEL / Maria Ruiz DASCHA POLANCO / Dayanara Diaz ALYSIA REINER / Natalie “Fig” Figueroa JUDITH ROBERTS / Taslitz ELIZABETH RODRIGUEZ / Aleida Diaz BARBARA ROSENBLAT / Miss Rosa NICK SANDOW / Joe Caputo ABIGAIL SAVAGE / Gina TAYLOR SCHILLING / Piper Chapman CONSTANCE SHULMAN / Yoga Jones DALE SOULES / Frieda YAEL STONE / Lorna Morello LORRAINE TOUSSAINT / Yvonne “Vee” Parker LIN TUCCI / Anita DeMarco SAMIRA WILEY / Poussey Washington VEEP (HBO) SUFE BRADSHAW / Sue Wilson ANNA CHLUMSKY / Amy Brookheimer GARY COLE / Kent Davidson KEVIN DUNN / Ben Cafferty TONY HALE / Gary Walsh JULIA LOUIS-DREYFUS / Vice President Selina Meyer REID SCOTT / Dan Egan TIMOTHY SIMONS / Jonah Ryan MATT WALSH / Mike McLintock SAG AWARDS HONORS FOR STUNT ENSEMBLES Outstanding Action Performance by a Stunt Ensemble in a Motion Picture “FURY” (Columbia Pictures) “GET ON UP” (Universal Pictures) “THE HOBBIT: THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES” (Warner Bros. Pictures) “UNBROKEN” (Universal Pictures) “X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST” (20th Century Fox) Outstanding Action Performance by a Stunt Ensemble in a Comedy or Drama Series (6 nominees) “24: LIVE ANOTHER DAY” (FOX) “BOARDWALK EMPIRE” (HBO) “GAME OF THRONES” (HBO) “HOMELAND” (Showtime) “SONS OF ANARCHY” (FX) “THE WALKING DEAD” (AMC) LIFE ACHIEVEMENT AWARD Screen Actors Guild 51st Annual Life Achievement Award DEBBIE REYNOLDS

This month: mother issues. Unless, instead, the issues are actually with women—or possibly with car mechanics? Look, an overwhelming number of Americans think women can avoid turning into their mothers. And, it says here, we definitely don’t want women to fix our cars, smoke, or love Fatal Attraction, and, according to two other poll questions, we value bold and smart over sweet and pretty. So far, so good. Men also say they wouldn’t trade their mothers for a “perfect woman”;—this woman presumably being the sort who is bold, smart, doesn’t like Fatal Attraction, and is a non-smoking non-car-mechanic. (Unasked was the question of whether men would trade Mom for a good mechanic.) But the most important quality Americans are looking for in a woman is that she should be a “good mother.”; Which must mean that, for a woman, becoming just like her mom might in fact turn out to be a good thing. If that were to happen, would men consider trading their moms for one of those other moms—the ones we presumably don’t want women to turn into? But, even if we can navigate all that, where does it leave us when there’s car trouble?

Mr. Merullo helped the Cubs win Game 6 of the 1945 World Series in 12 innings. They lost Game 7 and haven’t played in a Fall Classic since. While playing in the 1945 World Series, as was the case any game day with the Chicago Cubs, Lennie Merullo made it his job “to get everybody relaxed on the ball club,” he recalled in a 2010 interview with the Globe. “And being the shortstop I was supposed to be the pepperpot, keep everybody alive, ‘C’mon, let’s go! How many outs? Two outs!’ ” Mr. Merullo, the oldest living Cubs player, died Saturday in the Sawtelle Family Hospice House in Reading of complications from a stroke he suffered three weeks ago. At 98, he also had been the last Cub alive to have played in a World Series. His baseball talent and strong throwing arm had lifted him out of East Boston, where he was the ninth of 12 children and, according to his family, slept “head to toe with a selection of brothers.” He played seven seasons with the Cubs, from 1941 through 1947, and spent decades as a major league scout. Mr. Merullo, who lived in Reading for 60 years, was inducted into the Professional Baseball Scouts Hall of Fame in 2008. Advertisement He carried more than just memories from the 1945 World Series. On one play, a Detroit Tigers player “came in spikes high,” Mr. Merullo told WBUR-FM last June, and the scar remained the rest of his life. His key moment in the Series was in the sixth game, which ran 12 innings. Mr. Merullo recorded the final out in the top of the 12th when he tagged Joe Hoover, who was trying to steal second for the Tigers. The Cubs won in the bottom of the 12th but lost Game 7 and the championship and have yet to make it back to the World Series. Nam Y. Huh/Associated Press/File Mr. Merullo returned to Chicago last year to throw out a ceremonial first pitch at a Cubs game. Get Metro Headlines in your inbox: The 10 top local news stories from metro Boston and around New England delivered daily. Sign Up Thank you for signing up! Sign up for more newsletters here Last year, however, Mr. Merullo returned to Chicago to throw out the ceremonial first pitch for a June 7 Cubs game as part of Wrigley Field’s 100th anniversary celebrations. “I’ll tell ya’, you don’t know what a thrill it is for me to be here in Chicago,” he said while sitting in the announcer’s booth during the game, adding: “I’ll never, ever forget this moment.” When Mr. Merullo was on the field for the first pitch, he took a step away from his walker and doffed his cap to cheers from the crowd, and then drew more applause when he made three exaggerated throwing motions before tossing the ball to the waiting Cubs player. During the seventh inning stretch, he led the crowd in singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” “This is Lennie Merullo, let’s hear you all at once,” he said over the public address system. “One, a-two, a-three, ‘Take me out to the ballgame. . .’ ” “If there was any doubt Wrigley Field does make dreams come true, you could look into Lennie’s eyes beaming with joy as he visited his beloved ballpark for what would be the last time,” Tom Ricketts, the Cubs’ chairman, said in a statement expressing condolences, adding that “our organization will never forget him.” Advertisement Leonard Richard Merullo was born May 5, 1917. His parents, Carmine and Angelina, raised their dozen children in a second-floor apartment in East Boston. Carmine worked at a paint company and the family grew vegetables and pressed wine from their own vines. Mr. Merullo traced his early baseball playing to pickup games with friends on East Boston’s Byron Street. “They named that movie after me, ‘The Natural,’ ” he joked in the 2010 Globe interview, adding that, “Every kid wanted to be a ballplayer, and Byron Street, there was always enough kids to have a game.” Joanne Rathe/Globe Staff/File Mr. Merullo posed in his Reading home in 2010 with a bat used by Babe Ruth. He was good enough to catch the eye of Ralph Wheeler, the scholastic sports editor of the Boston Herald who also was a scout for the Cubs and the Boston Braves. Wheeler helped Mr. Merullo get into St. John’s Preparatory School in Danvers, from which he hitchhiked home to visit on weekends, and into Villanova University. He signed with the Cubs his senior year. The team called him up from the minor leagues in 1941. “If you can imagine, back in those days, a boy born and raised in East Boston, signing with the Cubs. And where did they have spring training? Catalina Island, in California. It was a dream come true,” he said in the Globe interview. The year Mr. Merullo became a major leaguer he married Mary Eugenia Geggis, who was known as Jean and had grown up across the street in East Boston. “I’d be looking out my window to see if I could see her,” Mr. Merullo told the Globe. “And if she saw me, she’d look out her window. On foggy days, we’d draw ‘S’s in the window for ‘Sweethearts.’ ” They celebrated their 74th wedding anniversary in February. Advertisement Baseball became a multigeneration family pursuit and gave a nickname to the couple’s first child. Playing on little sleep after the birth of Len Jr., Mr. Merullo committed four errors in the second game of a September 1942 doubleheader against the Boston Braves at Braves Field. “If they hit me another ball, I would have booted that one, too,” he recalled in the Globe interview. ‘Every kid wanted to be a ballplayer, and Byron Street, there was always enough kids to have a game.’ Lennie Merullo, in a 2010 interview with the Globe, reminiscing about playing pickup games in East Boston A Chicago newspaper headline the next day announced: “ ‘Boots’ is Born, Merullo Boots Four.” The name stuck even after Len Jr. grew up to be a good enough athlete to play minor league baseball with the Pittsburgh Pirates organization. Len Jr.’s son Matt played for the Chicago White Sox, Cleveland Indians, and Minnesota Twins. Matt’s son Nick signed with the Baltimore Orioles organization last year, extending the Merullo baseball lineage to four generations. Bill Brett/Globe Photo/File 2010 Mr. Merullo (right) with Red Sox legend Johnny Pesky at the annual Oldtime Baseball Game in Cambridge. In 2006, the Boston chapter of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America presented Mr. Merullo with the Judge Emil Fuchs Memorial Award for his contributions to baseball. He finished his playing career with a .240 batting average in 639 games. He became a scout for the Cubs in 1950, joined the Major League Scouting Bureau in the 1970s, and worked until 2003, scouting for various teams. As he appraised players throughout New England and Canada’s eastern provinces, Mr. Merullo scribbled notes on a pad upon which he wrote five letters for headings: A, F, R, H, T, for arm, field, run, hit, and time to first base. He jotted a numerical rating under the first four and a stopwatch reading beneath the last. “You want to know what the player can do, not what he can’t,” he told the Globe in 1983. “You can list on one hand all the complete ballplayers in the history of baseball. Just about everyone can’t do something. You want to know what they can do.” A service will be announced for Mr. Merullo, who in addition to his wife, Jean, son Len Jr., grandson Matt, and great-grandson Nick leaves three other sons, Charles of London, Richard of Essex, and David of Reading; four other grandchildren; and, two other great-grandchildren. Like many fans, Mr. Merullo hoped the Cubs would someday return to the World Series. As for why the team hadn’t done so since he was the shortstop, he quipped in the 2010 interview that there was a simple reason. “They miss me,” he said. “My gosh, they miss me.” Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com

What would you say if I told you that a new series of phones is coming out that can get you some pretty top specs, while keeping the pricing around $300 off contract? Would you be intrigued? That's exactly what BLU Products is doing with its upcoming lineup of Quattro phones. If you haven't heard of BLU before now, let me give you a brief intro: this is a company to keep an eye on, because they're putting out some beautiful hardware while keeping the prices extremely affordable. Like most carrier-free manufacturers, they focus on quad-band GSM devices – the Quattro series is no exception. Every device in the Quattro line has two things in common: they're all packing a 1.5GHz quad-core NVIDIA Tegra 3 chip and Android 4.0. Don't sweat the Android version, though – they're already slated to get Jelly Bean. Quattro 4.5 As the lowest-end device of the Quattro collection, the 4.5 isn't going to blow your mind. But for a meager $250, it packs a 4.5" qHD display and a gig of RAM, along with a 5MP rear shooter, 4GB of storage, and a microSD card slot. The best part – it's actually pretty sleek looking. That's some good value right there. Quattro 4.5 HD Like the sound of the 4.5, but want something a little more high-end? Look no further than the 4.5 HD. It packs a 326ppi HD display wrapped in Corning Gorilla Glass, an f/2.4 8MP rear shooter, 16GB of internal storage, and 1GB of RAM. The price? $350. No contract. That's hard to beat. Quattro 5.7 HD Maybe you're into the larger-sized phones. Say hello to the 5.7 HD, which, as its name suggest, packs a massive 5.7" 1280x720 display. Aside from that, the 5.7 HD has 4GB of storage, a microSD card slot, 1GB RAM, and an 8MP rear shooter. You'll be able to land this bad boy for an impressive $300. So, when can you get 'em? The Quattro 4.5 and 4.5 HD will both be available "the first week of February through various websites in the U.S." The 5.7 HD, however, won't be hitting the virtual streets until the end of March – also through various U.S. retailers.

The media is now filled with headlines about North Korea’s missile test on Friday, which demonstrated that its ICBMs may be able to reach the continental U.S. What isn’t mentioned in any of these stories is how we got to this point — in particular, what Dan Coats, President Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence, explained last week at the Aspen Security Forum. North Korea’s 33-year-old dictator Kim Jong-un is not crazy, said Coats. In fact, he has “some rationale backing his actions” regarding the country’s nuclear weapons. That rationale is the way the U.S. has demonstrated that North Korea must keep them to ensure “survival for his regime, survival for his country.” Kim, according to Coats, “has watched, I think, what has happened around the world relative to nations that possess nuclear capabilities and the leverage they have and seen that having the nuclear card in your pocket results in a lot of deterrence capability.” In particular, “The lessons that we learned out of Libya giving up its nukes … is, unfortunately: If you had nukes, never give them up. If you don’t have them, get them.” This is, of course, blindingly obvious and has been since the U.S. helped oust longtime Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in 2011. But U.S. officials have rarely if ever acknowledged this reality. Here’s the timeline: In December 2003, Libya announced that it would surrender its biological and chemical weapons stockpiles, as well as its rudimentary nuclear weapons program. In celebrating Libya’s decision, President George W. Bush declared that the rest of the world should take away the message that “leaders who abandon the pursuit of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, and the means to deliver them, will find an open path to better relations with the United States and other free nations.” Paula DeSutter, Bush’s Assistant Secretary of State for Verification and Compliance, explained that “we want Libya to be a model for other countries.” In 2011, the U.S. and NATO conducted a bombing campaign to assist Libyan rebels in overthrowing the Gaddafi government. Gaddafi himself was captured by one rebel faction, who apparently sodomized him with a bayonet and then killed him. You would definitely expect this to get the attention of North Korea’s ruling clique — especially given that Iraq had also disarmed and then been invaded, with its dictator executed by a howling mob. And, indeed, North Korea said this explicitly at the time. Its foreign ministry stated, “The Libyan crisis is teaching the international community a grave lesson,” which was that the deal to rid Libya of weapons of mass destruction had been “an invasion tactic to disarm the country.” Yet the Obama administration shamelessly denied this. A reporter told State Department spokesperson Mark Toner that “North Koreans are looking at this” and it didn’t “give them a lot of incentive to give up their nuclear weapons.” Toner replied that “where [Libya is] at today has absolutely no connection with them renouncing their nuclear program and nuclear weapons.” Moreover, North Koreans and other countries can read, and so understand what America’s foreign policy elite has repeatedly explained why we want small countries to disarm. It’s not because we fear that they will use WMD in a first strike on us, since nations like North Korea understand that would immediately lead to their obliteration. Instead, our mandarins explicitly say the problem is that unconventional weapons help small countries deter us from attacking them. There are many examples. For instance, in a 2001 memo, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stated: Several of these [small enemy nations] are intensely hostile to the United States and are arming to deter us from bringing our conventional or nuclear power to bear in a regional crisis. … [U]niversally available [WMD] technologies can be used to create “asymmetric” responses that cannot defeat our forces, but can deny access to critical areas in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia…“asymmetric” approaches can limit our ability to apply military power. The think tank Project for a New American Century, a neoconservative pressure group that had a heavy influence on George W. Bush’s administration, made the same point in an influential paper called “Rebuilding America’s Defenses”: The United States also must counteract the effects of the proliferation of ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction that may soon allow lesser states to deter U.S. military action by threatening U.S. allies and the American homeland itself. Of all the new and current missions for U.S. armed forces, this must have priority. … In the post-Cold War era, America and its allies, rather than the Soviet Union, have become the primary objects of deterrence and it is states like Iraq, Iran and North Korea who most wish to develop deterrent capabilities. In fact, even Dan Coats himself has said this, in a 2008 op-ed he co-wrote. “An Islamic Republic of Iran with nuclear weapons capability would be strategically untenable,” Coats said, because it would possess a “deterrent” against U.S. attack. And to prevent Iran from acquiring the ability to deter us, he explained, we might have to attack them. Video of Coats speaking and his full remarks are below:

Share and Pin for later! 110 This post may contains affiliate links. This means if you buy something through a link in this post, I will make a small commission at no cost to you. This allows me to keep bringing you great content. *This post contains affiliate links. Spending time together is so important in relationships, but with the busyness of everyday life, finding time for a date night can get lost in the shuffle. If you are wanting to rekindle some spark in your marriage or just get some time together without the kids, here is a great list of date night ideas to try. Just a note, some of these ideas would be fun with the kiddos, but this is a date night – get a sitter and go have some adult fun! Sporty Date Night Ideas Take a walk. Ride bikes together Rent a tandem bike (major trust exercise if you are in the back!) Go hiking Rent some kayaks or stand-up paddle boards at a nearby lake Run a race together See a minor (or major) league baseball game Rent a pontoon boat with a group of friends Take a mini-road trip to a new destination near by Go to the pool (without the kids) 🙂 Take a gym class together Bowling Go to a rock gym (or take a rock climbing class) Play mini golf together try rollerblading /rollerskating Foodie Date Night Ideas Visit a farmer’s market Get dressed up and eat at a fancy restaurant Pick fruit or berries at a local “u-pick” orchard Take a cooking class Pack a picnic Get takeout from a new restaurant and have a picnic Try a “paint and sip” art class (super fun if you’ve never tried it) Have dinner at a new restaurant Around Town Date Night Ideas See an outside movie Watch the fireworks cozied up on a blanket together See a comedy show (laughing together is so good!) Go to a concert Visit a local food/art/music festival Take a pottery throwing class (Ghost, anyone?!) Visit a local tourist attraction you’ve never been to Organize a game night with other parents (always a fun time) Visit a new museum Get a couples massage Play games at a local arcade (this is a personal favorite of ours, and cheap!) Go see a play or musical Browse a flea market Visit a state park near by Visit an amusement park Go to the county fair Check out (and participate in!) a karaoke night Play trivia at a local sports bar Test drive a car you could never afford Check out the local yard sales Play with the cats and dogs at a local animal shelter Visit residents of a local nursing home Volunteer together Go to the circus At Home Date Night Ideas Play board games Do a marriage bible study together ( this is our favorite – so fun!) Rent a Redbox and make some popcorn Play cards Make a “question jar” and take turns pulling out questions and answering them Have fun spending some time together! Did you try one of these activities? How did it go?! Do you have a favorite date night activity that you think other couples would enjoy? Share it below in the comments! Suggested Posts Be sure to Pin these ideas for your next date night!

Trump criticizes his predecessors at Monday’s press conference. During a press conference on Monday afternoon, President Trump was asked why he has yet to comment on the deaths of four U.S. service members killed in an ISIS ambush in Niger ten days ago. Trump said he’d written condolence letters to their families, and planned to call them too: I’ve written them personal letters. They’ve been sent, or they’re going out tonight, but they were written during the weekend. I will, at some point during the period of time, call the parents and the families — because I have done that, traditionally. I felt very, very badly about that. I always feel badly. It’s the toughest — the toughest calls I have to make are the calls where this happens, soldiers are killed. It’s a very difficult thing. Now, it gets to a point where, you know, you make four or five of them in one day — it’s a very, very tough day. For me, that’s by far the toughest. That would have been an acceptable answer (though that doesn’t explain why he hasn’t made any public comments about the incident). However, since the president cannot accept blame and claims he’s the best at everything, he went on to accuse his predecessors of failing to call the families of fallen troops: So, the traditional way — if you look at President Obama and other presidents, most of them didn’t make calls, a lot of them didn’t make calls. I like to call when it’s appropriate, when I think I’m able to do it. They have made the ultimate sacrifice. So, generally, I would say that I like to call. I’m going to be calling them. I want a little time to pass. I’m going to be calling them. I have — as you know, since I’ve been president, I have. But in addition, I actually wrote letters individually to the soldiers we’re talking about, and they’re going to be going out either today or tomorrow. Yes. Trump on soldiers killed in Niger: "President Obama and other presidents, most of them didn't make calls ... I call when it's appropriate." pic.twitter.com/sgj5iEuDhz — Axios (@axios) October 16, 2017 This is one of Trump’s more outrageous accusations, and he actually walked it back a bit later in the press conference. After a reporter called him out on his false claim that previous presidents didn’t reach out to fallen service members’ families, Trump suggested that he meant he’s going above and beyond by reaching out with a letter and a phone call: Q: Earlier, you said that President Obama never called the families of fallen soldiers. How can you make that claim? THE PRESIDENT: I don’t know if he did. No, no, no, I was told that he didn’t often. And a lot of Presidents don’t; they write letters. I do – Q: (Inaudible.) THE PRESIDENT: Excuse me, Peter. I do a combination of both. Sometimes — it’s a very difficult thing to do, but I do a combination of both. President Obama I think probably did sometimes, and maybe sometimes he didn’t. I don’t know. That’s what I was told. All I can do — all I can do is ask my generals. Other Presidents did not call. They’d write letters. And some Presidents didn’t do anything. But I like the combination of – I like, when I can, the combination of a call and also a letter. Trump’s insinuation that previous presidents didn’t do enough to reach out to troops’ families was quickly refuted by journalists, former aides, and people who lost their loved ones: that's a fucking lie. to say president obama (or past presidents) didn't call the family members of soldiers KIA - he's a deranged animal. — Alyssa Mastromonaco (@AlyssaMastro44) October 16, 2017 Pete Souza: 'I photographed [President Obama] meeting with hundreds of wounded soldiers, and family members of those killed in action.' pic.twitter.com/01pICn3YVo — Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) October 16, 2017 This is an outrageous and disrespectful lie even by Trump standards. Also: Obama never attacked a Gold Star family. https://t.co/JgzTUIzWIa — Ben Rhodes (@brhodes) October 16, 2017 .@realDonaldTrump When my brother was killed, Pres Bush listened while I screamed at him & then held me as I sobbed, you fat fucking liar. https://t.co/SEIw74OeZG — Delilia O'Malley (@DeliliaOMalley) October 16, 2017 Later, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders claimed that Trump wasn’t criticizing his predecessors at all, he was merely stating facts: “Sometimes they call, sometimes they send a letter, other times they have the opportunity to meet family members in person.” But it’s clear that President Trump wasn’t making a technical note based on his detailed analysis of how his predecessors reached out to grieving military families. As with many of Trump’s dubious facts, it appears his source is something he heard once in the right-wing media. President Obama’s ostensible disrespect for the military was, of course, a popular theme in the conservative press, and it seems Trump might have been referencing some of these reports. While the Washington Times reported in 2009 that Obama wrote out personalized letters to fallen troops’ families and signed them “Barack,” what drew more attention was a claim deep in a 2010 story from The News Tribune about a father’s dissatisfaction with how politicians responded to his son’s death in Afghanistan. The father said he asked the White House to call his ex-wife and “was told that Obama did not regularly make phone calls to the families of fallen soldiers.” Trump’s note that he “actually wrote letters individually” was likely a reference to a 2012 post from the Gateway Pundit that claimed President Obama sent grieving military families “form letters — signed by an electric pen.” The White House said Obama “personally signs every letter to the families of fallen service members in Iraq and Afghanistan,” but did not dispute that they were form letters. (In 2003 Newsweek reported that the sympathy letters sent out by President George W. Bush were form letters as well.) Six days after the 2015 shootings at two military facilities in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the mother of one of the five servicemen killed in the attack appeared on Hannity and said she’d yet to receive a call from Obama. There was also uproar from the right about the White House waiting five days to order flags at half-staff. Breitbart illustrated its report, titled “Obama Refuses to Call Mother of Murdered Marine; White House Won’t Lower Flag,” with the White House lit up to celebrate the Supreme Court decision allowing same-sex marriage. Trump appeared on The O’Reilly Factor on the night Sean Hannity’s interview aired, and he tweeted several times about the points the host raised, so it seems likely he saw the episode. It’s true that, in the past, some military families have been dissatisfied with the president’s response to the death of their loved one. It is completely false, however, to suggest that it’s “traditional” for the president to not even call the families of fallen service members. There is ample evidence that President Obama, President George W. Bush, and previous presidents made a habit of calling, writing, and meeting with military families who lost loved ones. It seems mostly likely that Trump was basing his assertion on reports about Obama amplified in conservative media. But to make matters worse, rather than just admitting that he didn’t have all the facts, Trump pinned his inaccurate comments on top members of the military. “That’s what I was told,” he said. “All I can do — all I can do is ask my generals.”

MarketWatch CBOE Volatility Index: Three-year chart. Russell Rhoads blogs Thursday at CBOE Options Hub that traders are still abuzz over a position taken earlier this week. The \”1 by 8 Call Backspread\” cost $50,000 to put on but won\’t pay off unless the VIX shoots above 28.43 by Sept. 17. The VIX , affectionately known as the \”fear index,\” is in the midteens at the moment. However, if volatility increases sharply — say, from U.S. military action in Syria or Congress\’s refusing to raise the debt limit — the trade pays off big time, adding $175,000 for each 0.01-point gain in the index above the break-even point. If the VIX hits 30 before the options expire, the trader will be up more than $27 million. The VIX\’s 52-week high is 23.23. It last traded above 30 in late 2011. — Tom Bemis Follow The Tell @thetellblog Follow Tom Bemis @TomBemis

Update: It’s now live! Shortly after Google acquired smartphone company, Nest, the thermostat and smoke alarm maker announced a “Works with Nest” program that would enable all sorts of smart products to interact with those made by Nest. Of course, the most obvious partner in this program is Google. In the announcement, Nest noted that this “Fall” we would be able to say to our phones, “OK, Google, set the temperature to 72 degrees,” or something along those lines and watch as our Nest changed temperatures. While we have yet to see this integration fully appear, it does look as though we are about one step away from it becoming a reality. A reader of ours (and confirmed by us) noticed that if you tell Google to set the temperature on your Nest (“set Nest to 68 degrees”), it tries to complete the task. It fails initially, but that’s because it needs you to authorize your Google account to work with Nest, so there is an option to opt-in accompanying the failure notice (the “Works with Nest” button). Unfortunately, this authorization step is the one that needs to go live from Google in order for all of this to work. As you can see below, Google and Nest have a page setup already for this action to take place, but when you tap on “Yes, I’m in,” it redirects to a page that is not quite live yet. And actually, there are two integrations that we will soon see – one for simply setting the temperature, and another that will recognize that you are on your way home, so that it can set your preferred temperature. This action will be accompanied by a Google Now card. So again, we aren’t quite there yet, but we are oh so close. Cheers Keith!

India's new mass surveillance project, dubbed Centralised Monitoring System (CMS), will reportedly be fully operational by the first quarter of 2017, according to a draft Universal Periodic Review (UPR) report, which is due to be reviewed by the UN in the coming months. Concerns have been raised by privacy experts over the programme potentially expanding the government's control over internet rights and freedoms. The draft report, which has broad similarities with previous editions, also reportedly comes with completely new topics related to the state's role in controlling the internet. The new topics feature in two dedicated sub-sections titled "Fundamental Freedoms and Participation in Public and Political Life", part of the "Civil and Political Rights" framework. "India recognizes the importance of extending free speech guarantees to activities on the internet," the report says, also highlighting the need to control "misuse of the internet for inciting violence, spreading rumours and hatred or committing other illegal activities". "In order to prevent arbitrary use of this power to block content on the internet, the Supreme Court of India has put in place various adequate procedural safeguards such as the right to appeal a blocking decision, and the requirement for reasons in writing for issuing a blocking order," the report asserts. A footnote in the report cites the Supreme Court's landmark ruling in a 2013 case which essentially halted any arrests under Section 66A of the Information Technology Act. However the law, which was India's primary measure in dealing with cybercrime and digital commerce, has since been comprehensively struck down. A section in the report titled "Right to Privacy and Surveillance" asserts that the government has an inherent right to surveillance, citing security concerns. The government seeks to set up the CMS to automate the "lawful interception and monitoring of telecommunications", which include voice data from users mobile phones, landlines and internet-related user data. However, the government asserts in the draft report that it has placed appropriate safeguards to address "concerns about privacy and freedom of speech". "India believes that its surveillance programme furthers its national security interests, and that safeguards in the law, including safe transmission of content, requirement for authorisation from senior officials, and the existence of a review committee to oversee such authorisations, are sufficient to address concerns regarding privacy and freedom of speech," the report states. Privacy concerns Privacy experts and activists have raised concerns over the scope of the CMS' power and reach over citizens' data. A 2016 report on India's UPR by NGO Internet Democracy Project said: "No information has been made available about whose data will be collected, how the collected data will be used, or how long the data will be retained." India's Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi has previously argued before the Supreme Court, attempting to seemingly diminish citizens' privacy rights. "Violation of privacy doesn't mean anything because privacy is not a guaranteed right," he reportedly said. More notably, India's privacy bill has been languishing in the bowels of bureaucracy since 2014, according to multiple unspecified sources with knowledge of the matter, The Wire reported. India's intelligence agencies, including the Intelligence Bureau, are believed to have been resistant towards implementation of full-fledged privacy legislation.

In recently released footage from NASA, scientists show off one their latest innovations, the ‘Supersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator,’ on a test model ‘flying saucer,’ 180,000 feet above the Earth. As part on NASA’s Low Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) program designed to test the technology needed to one day land massive payloads on Mars, scientists launched the test vehicle into the atmosphere using 34-million cubic foot scientific balloon. Once the vehicle arrived at 120,000 feet it then used its own rocket to increase its altitude an additional 60,000 feet. After ‘despinning’ the vehicle, scientists were able to test out the Supersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator; popping out like a donut around the ship and slowing it to two-and-a-half times the speed of sound. According to narrator Ian Clark, the device then deployed a ballute to release a 200-pound parachute for its descent to Earth, although he does note that the parachute did incur some rips. According to Clark, based upon the results of the flight, “We now have a data set we will use to prepare for two more tests in June of 2015.” Watch the video below courtesy of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory:

Translated by Zameelur Rahman Ishaq ibn Ibrahim and Muhammad ibn Rafi‘ narrated to us – and the wording is Ibn Rafi‘’s – Ishaq said: ‘Abd al-Razzaq reported to us, and Ibn Rafi‘ said: narrated to us: Ma‘mar reported to us: from Ibn Tawus from his father from Ibn ‘Abbas, he said: “Divorce, a divorce with three [issuances], in the time of the Messenger of Allah (Allah bless him and grant him peace) and Abu Bakr and two years of the caliphate of ‘Umar was [counted as] one. Then ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab said: ‘Verily, the people have hastened in a matter in which they used to have patience, so if only we were to enforce it on them.’ So he enforced it on them.” (Sahih Muslim) When a man issues three divorces to his wife in one sitting[ ] or with one statement[ ], do they all occur? There are three positions on this question: First, the position of the four Imams and the vast majority of the scholars from the salaf and the khalaf, and that is that all three occur thereby and the woman becomes mughallazah (permanently irrevocably divorced)[ ] by means of it, so she is not lawful for her previous husband until she marries [and consummates the marriage with] a husband besides him. This was narrated from Ibn ‘Abbas, Abu Hurayrah, Ibn ‘Umar, ‘Abd Allah ibn ‘Amr, Ibn Mas‘ud and Anas, and it is the opinion of the majority of the people of knowledge from the Tabi‘in and the imams after them, as mentioned in al-Mughni by Ibn Qudamah (7:104). It was also narrated from ‘Umar, ‘Uthman, ‘Ali, al-Hasan ibn ‘Ali and ‘Ubadah ibn al-Samit (Allah be pleased with them) as will come. Second, that nothing occurs thereby, and this is the position of the Ja‘fari Shi‘ah, as stated by al-Hilli al-Shi‘i in Shara‘i al-Islam (2:57), and al-Nawawi also related it from al-Hajjaj ibn Artah, Ibn Muqatil and Muhammad ibn Ishaq. Third, the position of some of the literalists and Ibn Taymiyyah and Ibn al-Qayyim (Allah have mercy on them), which is that only one revocable divorce occurs thereby. Ibn Qudamah related it also from ‘Ata’, Tawus, Sa‘id ibn Jubayr, Abu al-Sha‘tha’ and ‘Amr ibn Dinar, but it is not authentic from Tawus and ‘Ata’. As for Tawus, because of what al-Husayn ibn ‘Ali al-Karabisi transmitted in Adab al-Qada’: ‘Ali ibn ‘Abd Allah (Ibn al-Madini) reported to us from ‘Abd al-Razzaq from Ma‘mar from Ibn Tawus that he said about Tawus: “Whoever narrates to you from Tawus that he would narrate three divorces as [being] one, he has lied upon him.” And as for ‘Ata’, because of what Ibn Jurayj narrated, he said: I said to ‘Ata’: “Did you hear Ibn ‘Abbas say: ‘Divorcing a virgin thrice is one [divorce]?’ He said: ‘That did not reach me from him.’” ‘Allamah al-Kawthari (Allah have mercy on him) cited these in his treatise al-Ishfaq ‘ala Ahkam al-Talaq (p. 33, Matba‘ah Majallat al-Islam, Egypt) The literalists adduce the hadith of the chapter as proof, since Ibn ‘Abbas (Allah be pleased with him) stated explicitly that three divorces used to be counted as one in the time of the Messenger of Allah (Allah bless him and grant him peace); and [they adduce] what Ahmad and others narrated from the story of Rukanah ibn ‘Abd al-‘Aziz ibn ‘Abd Yazid: from ‘Ikrimah, the freed-slave of Ibn ‘Abbas, he said: “Rukanah ibn ‘Abd Yazid, the brother of al-Muttalib, divorced his wife thrice in one sitting, and he became extremely grieved over it.” He said: “The Messenger of Allah (Allah bless him and grant him peace) asked him: ‘How did you divorce her?’ He said: ‘I divorced her thrice.’” He said: “Then, he said: ‘In one sitting?’ He said: ‘Yes.’ He said: ‘Those are [counted as] only one so take her back if you wish.’” He said: “So he took her back.” This is how Ibn Taymiyyah transmitted it in his Fatawa (3:22). They do not have [any proofs] besides these two hadiths. The Proofs of the Majority on Three Occurring Together As for the majority, they have many hadiths that prove the occurrence three divorces, even if a man pronounces them in one sitting, and here are some of them: Al-Bukhari transmitted in Bab man Jawwaz al-Talaq al-Thalath from ‘A’ishah that a man divorced his wife thrice, and she remarried and was divorced, so the Prophet (Allah bless hm and grant him peace) was asked: “Is she permissible for the first [husband]?” He said: “No, until he tastes her honey[ ] just as the first tasted [it].” Hafiz [Ibn Hajar] in al-Fath (9:321) inclined towards [the view] that this incident is different from the incident of the wife of Rifa‘ah [in which three divorces were issued separately]. Hafiz said: “The proof is in the apparent [meaning] of his statement: ‘he divorced her thrice,’ as it is apparent in them having been issued together.” Al-Bukhari also transmitted in that chapter the story of ‘Uwaymir al-‘Ajlani regarding li‘an, where ‘Uwaymir said therein after the mutual imprecation: “I would have lied upon her, O Messenger of Allah, if I keep her,” so he divorced her thrice before the Messenger of Allah (Allah bless him and grant him peace) commanded him. ‘Allamah al-Kawthari said: “And it has not come in a narration from the narrations that he (Allah bless him and grant him peace) condemned him for this, so it proves the occurrence of three together, because the Messenger (Allah bless him and grant him peace) would not have left the people to understand the occurrence of three with one issuance if this understanding was incorrect, and the entire ummah understood that from it, even Ibn Hazm, since he said: ‘He only divorced her when he assumed that she was his wife, and were three not to occur together, he would have condemned him for that.’” End [quote] from al-Ishfaq ‘ala Ahkam al-Talaq. Al-Bayhaqi transmitted in his al-Sunan al-Kubra (7:336) from Suwayd ibn Ghafalah, he said: ‘A’ishah al-Khath‘amiyyah was with al-Hasan ibn ‘Ali (Allah be pleased with him)[ ]; when ‘Ali (Allah be pleased with him) was killed, she said: “May you take joy in the caliphate!” He said: “You are expressing glee over the death of ‘Ali?! Go, for you are divorced,” meaning “thrice.” He said: So she covered [herself] with her garment and she sat [in waiting] until her waiting period ended, and then he dispatched to her the leftover which remained of hers from her dowry, and ten thousand [coins] as charity. When the messenger came to her, she said: “A small commodity from a parting lover.” When her statement reached him, he wept, and then he said: “Were it not that I heard my grandfather,” or, “I heard my father that he heard my grandfather say: ‘Whichever man divorced his wife thrice in the periods,’” or “‘thrice’” ambiguously[ ], “‘she is not permissible for him until she marries a husband besides him,’ I would have taken her back.” Its chain is authentic. Ibn Rajab al-Hanbali al-Hafiz said this after he quoted this hadith in his book Bayan Mushkil al-Ahadith al-Waridah fi anna l-Talaq al-Thalath Wahidah, as found in al-Ishfaq (p. 24), and al-Haythami cited it in Majma‘ al-Zawa’id, (4:339 – Bab Mut‘at al-Talaq) from al-Tabari and he said: “And there is weakness in its narrators, and they have been declared trustworthy.” That which al-Nasa’i transmitted from Mahmud ibn Labid has passed, about the one who divorced his wife thrice, so the Messenger of Allah (Allah bless him and grant him peace) became angry at him. Ibn al-‘Arabi mentioned it in opposition to the hadith of Ibn ‘Abbas in the chapter, and he said: “It is opposed by the hadith of Mahmud ibn Labid, since there is an explicit mention in it that the man issued divorce thrice together, and the Prophet (Allah bless him and grant him peace) did not reject it, but he enforced it.” ‘Allamah al-Kawthari said: “Perhaps, he intended the narration of other than al-Nasa’i (because there is nothing in the narration of al-Nasa’i which states clearly that he enforced it), and Abu Bakr al-‘Arabi is a hafiz, extremely vast in narration, or he intended that had he rejected it, it would have been mentioned in the hadith, and his (Allah bless him and grant him peace) anger also proves their occurrence, and this is sufficient [to prove] what he intended.” Al-Tabrani transmitted the story of Ibn ‘Umar’s divorce of his wife while she was menstruating, and he added at its end: “O Messenger of Allah! Had I divorced her thrice, would it be [allowed] for me to take her back?” He said: “Then, she would have separated from you, and it would be a sin.” Al-Haythami said after citing it in Majma‘ al-Zawa’id (4:336): “And al-Tabrani narrated it, and in it is ‘Ali ibn Sa‘id al-Razi. Al-Daraqutni said: ‘He is not that [strong], and [others] besides him glorified him, and the rest of its narrators are trustworthy.” The weak slave (may Allah pardon him) says: Al-Dhahabi wrote a biography of ‘Ali ibn Sa‘id al-Razi in Mizan al-I‘tidal (3:131 – Biography: 5850), and he said: “A hafiz, well-travelled, itinerant. Al-Daraqutni said: He is not that [strong], he was isolated in [narrating] things. I say: He heard Jubarahm ibn al-Mughallis and ‘Abd al-A‘la ibn Hammad. Al-Tabrani, al-Hasan ibn Rashiq and a group narrated from him. Ibn Yunus said: ‘He would understand and memorise.’” Hence it is clear that no one spoke ill of him besides al-Daraqutni, and he criticised him using only light words, and al-Dhahabi was not satisfied with them. Isra’il ibn Yunus declared him trustworthy, and al-Dhahabi considered him a Hafiz. Hence, the hadith of the like of him will not be rejected, and it is corroborated by what has preceded from the author [Muslim] (hadith 354) through the route of Nafi‘: He said: “Then, when Ibn ‘Umar was asked about a man that divorced his wife while she was menstruating, he would say: ‘And if you divorced her thrice, you would have disobeyed your Lord in that which He commanded you in terms of [the procedure of] divorcing your wife, and she would become separated from you.” The outward of it [suggests] that he heard that from the Messenger of Allah (Allah bless him and grant him peace). Al-Nasa’i drew proof for the occurrence of three [divorces issued] together from the story of Fatimah bint Qays, in which it is mentioned that he sent to her [a messenger] with three pronunciations of divorce. She said: The Messenger of Allah (Allah bless him and grant him peace) said: “Maintenance and shelter is only for the woman when the husband has [the right of] revocation over her.” And it has occurred from al-Daraqutni (4:11,12) through the route of Abu Salamah: “Hafs ibn ‘Amr ibn al-Mughirah divorced Fatimah bint Qays with one statement thrice.” [This is] from that which proves that these three were [issued] together. Based on this, al-Nasa’i’s drawing proof from this story is correct. However, that which contradicts this was transmitted by Muslim, since it has come in it: “He divorced her with the last of three divorces” and in some narrations: “He divorced her with a divorce that remained from her divorce.” [This is] from that which proves that the three did not occur together. Hence, the weightier [view] is that it is not correct to use the story of Fatimah bint Qays as proof due to the contradiction in the narrations, or due to the narration of Muslim being stronger than the narration of al-Daraqutni. And Allah knows best. ‘Abd al-Razzaq (2:393) and al-Tabrani – and the wording is his – transmitted from ‘Ubadah ibn al-Samit (Allah be pleased with him), he said: One of my ancestors divorced his wife a thousand times, so his children proceeded to the Messenger of Allah (Allah bless him and grant him peace), and they said: “O Messenger of Allah! Indeed, our father divorced our mother a thousand times. Does he have any way out?” He said: “Verily, your father did not have fear of Allah (Exalted is He) such that He should make for him in his matter a way out! She is separated from him with three [divorces], not on [the way of] Sunnah, and the nine hundred and ninety seven are a sin on his neck.” Al-Haythmi said in Majma‘ al-Zawa’id (4:338, Bab fiman Tallaqa Akthara min Thalath): “And in it is ‘Ubayd Allah ibn al-Walid al-Wassafi al-‘Ijli, and he is weak.” I say: Ahmad said of him: “His hadiths are written for knowledge,” as found in al-Mizan (3:17). This is why I mentioned this hadith of his, as support, not as independent [evidence]. ‘Abd al-Razzaq transmitted in his Musannaf (6:393 – hadith: 11340) through the route of al-Thawri from Salamah ibn Kuhayl from Zayd ibn Wahb that [the case of] a man who divorced his wife a thousand times was raised to ‘Umar, and he said: “I was only playing.” So ‘Umar (Allah be pleased with him) overcame him with the whip, and he said: “Only three of those would have been sufficient for you!” Al-Bayhaqi (7:334) transmitted it also through the route of Shu’bah from Salamah ibn Kuhyal, and both routes and their narrators are the narrators of the Group. Al-Bayhaqi (7:334) transmitted through the route of Sa‘id ibn Mansur: Sufyan narrated to us from Shaqiq, he heard Anas ibn Malik say: ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab (Allah be pleased with him) said about the man that divorces his wife thrice before he penetrates her, he said: “They are three. She is not permissible for him until she marries a husband besides him.” And when he was brought to him, he would punish him. ‘Abd al-Razzaq (7:394) transmitted from Ibrahim ibn Muhammad from Sharik ibn Abi Namir, he said: A man came to ‘Ali and he said: “Indeed, I divorced my wife the number of ‘arfaj [plants].” He said: “You take three from the [number of] ‘arfaj [plants] and you leave the rest.” Ibrahim said: Abu l-Huwayrith reported to me from ‘Uthman ibn ‘Affan the like of that. Sharik ibn Abi Namr is “truthful, erring,” as found in al-Taqrib, but he is corroborated by what al-Bayhaqi (7:334) transmitted from two routes from ‘Ali (Allah be pleased with him) about the one who divorced his wife thrice before he penetrates her, he said: “She is not permissible for him until she marries a husband besides him.” Malik transmitted in his Muwatta’ (Talaq al-Bikr, p. 207) from ‘Ata’ ibn Yasar, he said: A man came asking ‘Abd Allah ibn ‘Amr ibn al-‘As about a man that divorced his wife thrice before he touches her. ‘Ata’ said: I said: “The divorce of a virgin is only one.[ ]” ‘Abd Allah ibn ‘Amr said: “You are only a storyteller! One [divorce] separates her, and three makes her forbidden until she marries a husband besides him.” ‘Abd al-Razzaq (hadith 11343) transmitted from Ma‘mar from al-A‘mash from Ibrahim from ‘Alqamah, he said: A man came to Ibn Mas‘ud and he said: “I divorced my wife ninety nine times, and I asked [the people of knowledge] and it was said to me: ‘She is separated from me.’” Ibn Mas‘ud said: “Indeed they love to separate you from her.” He said: “So what do you say, Allah have mercy on you?” He thought he will find a dispensation for him. Thereupon, he said: “Three separates her from you, and the rest is transgression.” ‘Abd al-Razzaq (11344) transmitted from Ma‘mar from al-Zuhri from Salim from Ibn ‘Umar, he said: “Whoever divorces his wife thrice, she is divorced, and he has disobeyed his Lord.” And al-Bayhaqi transmitted through the route of ‘Ubayd Allah ibn ‘Umar from Nafi‘ from Ibn ‘Umar, he said: “When a man divorces his wife thrice before he penetrates her, she is not permissible for him until she marries a husband besides him.” Malik transmitted in al-Muwatta’ (Bab Talaq al-Bikr, p. 208) from Mu‘awiyah ibn Abi ‘Ayyash al-Ansari that he was sitting with ‘Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr and ‘Asim ibn ‘Umar. He said: Muhammad ibn Iyas ibn al-Bukayr came to them, and he said: “A man from the people of the desert divorced his wife thrice before he penetrated her so what do you two opine?” ‘Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr said: “No statement has reached us on this matter, so go to ‘Abd Allah ibn ‘Abbas and Abu Hurayrah, for indeed I left them with ‘A’ishah, so ask them and then come to us and inform us.” He went and asked them, so Ibn ‘Abbas said to Abu Hurayrah: “Answer him, O Abu Hurayrah! For indeed a complicated [matter] has come to you.” Abu Hurayrah said: “One separates her, and three makes her impermissible until she marries a husband besides him.” Ibn ‘Abbas said the like of this. This hadith instructs us that these five Sahabah (‘Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr, ‘Asim ibn ‘Umar, Abu Hurayrah, Ibn ‘Abbas and ‘A’ishah) were in agreement on the occurrence of three divorces with one statement. As for the position of Abu Hurayrah and Ibn ‘Abbas, [it is] manifest. As for ‘Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr and ‘Asim ibn ‘Umar, then because they found this matter difficult in the non-consummated [marriage], so if the number three was meaningless in the consummated [marriage], they would not have found that difficult and would have answered that the [divorces] do not occur in the non-consummated [marriage] by way of greater priority; and they only found the matter difficult because it was about the non-consummated [marriage]. As for ‘A’ishah (Allah be pleased with her), then because the apparent context of the story is that she was present when Abu Hurayrah and Ibn ‘Abbas answered with this . Thus, these jurists of the Sahabah, the likes of ‘Umar, ‘Ali, ‘Uthman, Ibn Mas ‘ud, Ibn ‘Umar, ‘Abd Allah ibn ‘Amr, ‘Ubadah ibn al-Samit, Abu Hurayrah, Ibn ‘Abbas, Ibn al-Zubayr, ‘Asim ibn ‘Umar and ‘A’ishah are all agreed on the occurrence of three even if a man pronounces them in one sitting. And they are sufficient as proof and support. Reply to Opposing Evidences As for the hadith of Ibn ‘Abbas (Allah be pleased with them) in the chapter, the majority answered it using various replies, detailed by Hafiz in Fath (9:316-9), and the best of them according to me are two answers: First, that this hadith was transmitted with respect to a particular scenario, which is that the man repeats the word “divorce” with the intention of emphasis not initiation, as he says: “You are divorced, you are divorced, you are divorced.” Initially, due to the soundness of their hearts, it was accepted from them that they intended emphasis. Then, when [the number of] people increased in the time of ‘Umar and deception and its like, of that which prevents acceptance of the one who claims emphasis, became common amongst them, ‘Umar interpreted the word according to the outward [meaning] of repetition, and he enforced it on them in judicial decree. This answer was approved by al-Qurtubi and he strengthened it with the statement of ‘Umar: “Verily, the people have hastened in a matter in which they used to have patience.” Likewise, al-Nawawi said: “This is the most authentic of answers.” Second, that his statement, “three,” is interpreted, so that the intent of it is the word “albattah” (absolutely), as will come in the hadith of Rukanah, which is also from the narration of Ibn ‘Abbas. And this is a strong [possibility], and is supported by al-Bukhari’s inclusion in this chapter narrations in which is found “albattah” and hadiths in which there is a clear pronouncement of “three,” as though he is indicating that there is no difference between them, and that when “albattah” was used unqualifiedly, it is understood as three, unless the divorcer intends one, in which case it will be accepted [as one]. Hence, it as though some of the narrators of the hadith understood the word “albattah” as three due to the widespread understanding of the equality between them, so they narrated it with the word “three” although the intent was the word “albattah.” And [the meaning of the hadith is that] in the first period, they would accept [it as one divorce] from the one who said I intended one [divorce] in [saying] “albattah”, and then when it was the time of ‘Umar, he enforced all three in the outward judicial ruling. This is from Fath al-Bari. The weak slave (Allah pardon him) says: That the Sahabah reached consensus in the time of ‘Umar on the validity of what ‘Umar decreed, and none of them condemned that, supports this; and if his decree was an innovated decree – and refuge is from Allah – or was against the decree of the Messenger of Allah (Allah bless him and grant him peace), not even one of the Sahabah would be satisfied with that, let alone all of them; such that Ibn ‘Abbas himself – and he is the one who narrates the hadith of the chapter and the hadith of Rukanah, both of them – would issue fatwa on the binding-ness of three as you just came to know. Abu Dawud transmitted with a chain authenticated by Hafiz [Ibn Hajar al-‘Asqalani] in Fath al-Bari through the route of Mujahid, he said: I was with Ibn ‘Abbas, and a man came to him and said that he divorced his wife thrice, so he was silent until I thought that he would return her to him. Then he said: “One of you proceeds and commits a foolish deed, and then says: ‘O Ibn Abbas! O Ibn Abbas!’ Verily Allah said: ‘Whoever fears Allah, He brings forth a way out for him” (65:2), and indeed you did have fear of Allah, so I find no way out for you. You disobeyed your Lord and your wife is irrevocably separated from you.” Thus it is inconceivable from Ibn ‘Abbas that he had in his possession a ruling from the Prophet (Allah bless him and grant him peace), and then he issued a fatwa in opposition to it, except for a reason that became manifest to him. And the narrator of a report is more learned than [those] besides him of what he narrated. As for the hadith of Rukanah which Ibn Taymiyyah and others adduced as proof, it is what Ahmad and Abu Ya‘la transmitted, and authenticated, from Ibn ‘Abbas, he said: Rukanah ibn ‘Abd Yazid divorced his wife thrice in one sitting, so the Prophet (Allah bless him and grant him peace) said: “That is only one, so take her back if you wish,” whereupon he took her back. The answer to this is that the reports on the story of Rukanah’s divorce are conflicting. Thus, it is narrated from him that he divorced his wife thrice as in the hadith of Ibn ‘Abbas, according to Ahmad; and it is narrated from him that he divorced his wife with the word “albattah” as in the hadith of Rukanah himself according to Abu Dawud. This is why al-Bukhari found it defective due to the inconsistency, and Ibn ‘Abd al-Barr declared it weak in al-Tamhid as mentioned in al-Talkhis by Hafiz (3:213). The narration of Ibn ‘Abbas according to Ahmad was regarded as objectionable by al-Jassas and Ibn al-Humam due to its opposition to the narration of firm trustworthy narrators who narrated it with the word “albattah,” and Hafiz Ibn Hajar regarded it as defective in al-Talkhis al-Habir. Abu Dawud (Allah have mercy on him) gave preference in his Sunan to [the interpretation] that Rukanah only divorced his wife with “albattah” due to what he transmitted through the route of the family of Rukanah, and the household is more aware of the story than others. Hafiz [Ibn Hajar] said in Fath al-Bari (9:316): “And this is a strong explanation as it is possible some of its narrators interpreted ‘albattah’ as three, so they said: ‘He divorced her three times.’ Drawing evidence from the hadith of Ibn ‘Abbas is impeded due to this point.” The weak slave (may Allah pardon him) says: The upshot is that Rukanah (Allah be pleased with him) only divorced his wife with his statement: “You are divorced albattah,” and he did not intend by that but one divorce, and the Prophet (Allah bless him and grant him peace) considered him truthful and he allowed him to marry her again, and this is the intent of “he took her back” in the hadith. Some of the narrators thought that the intent of “albattah” is three divorces, so they narrated the hadith with the word “three.” If it is conceded that the reality is the reverse of what we said, and that Rukanah issued three divorces to his wife, and then some of them narrated it with the word “albattah,” then the Messenger of Allah (Allah bless him and grant him peace) did not regard it as one divorce except after he made him swear an oath that he did not intend by that except one divorce; due to what Abu Dawud, al-Tirmidhi, Ibn Majah and al-Darimi transmitted, in which it is [mentioned]: “He informed the Prophet (Allah bless him and grant him peace) of that and he said: ‘By Allah, I did not intend but one.’ So the Messenger of Allah (Allah bless him and grant him peace) said: ‘By Allah, You did not intend but one?’ Rukanah said: ‘By Allah, I did not intend except one.’ So the Messenger of Allah (Allah bless him and grant him peace) returned her to him.” Consider how the Messenger of Allah (Allah bless him and grant him peace) made him take an oath twice that he did not intend but one [divorce]. And we have mentioned earlier that the claim of the intention of emphasis was taken into consideration in judicial decrees in the time of the Prophet (Allah bless him and grant him peace) because that era was free of lying and deception. Were three divorces counted as one always, as Ibn Taymiyyah and those who agree him believe, the Messenger of Allah (Allah bless him and grant him peace) would not have made him take an oath that he intended one, because in that case there is no need for intention and no benefit in making him swear an oath, because Ibn Taymiyyah and those who agree with him do not make intention a condition in this, but they regard three as one even if the divorcer intended three. Thus, the most that the hadith of Rukanah (Allah be pleased with him) proves is that the Prophet (Allah bless him and grant him peace) regarding him as truthful with respect to the intention of emphasis in judicial decree, which is accepted according to us, and there is nothing in it that proves that three is one even if a man pronounces them with the intention of initiating [new divorces]. Hence, adducing it as proof is totally invalid. Then al-Qurtubi said: “And the proof of the majority for the binding-ness [of all three] from the perspective of reason is completely manifest. That is, the one divorced thrice is not permissible for the issuer of divorce until she marries a husband besides him, and there is no difference between them [i.e. the divorces] being together or separate, linguistically or in the Shari‘ah. And that which is conceived of, in terms of a difference [between them], is [only] in appearance. The Shari‘ah discards [this apparent difference], by agreement, in marriage, emancipating slaves and acknowledgements [of debt]. Hence, if a guardian was to say: ‘I wed you to these three [women],’ using one statement, it would be effected, just as if he were to say: ‘I wed you to this, this and this [woman].’ [The ruling] in emancipating and acknowledgement and other than them of laws is like this. Those who opine that when three occur together they are regarded as one argue that the one who says, ‘I swear by Allah thrice,’ his oath is not counted but as one oath, so the divorce ought to be the same as that. This is refuted by the difference between the two issues, as the divorcer initiates divorce of his wife and the maximum and the limit of her divorce has been stipulated as three, so when he says, ‘You are divorced thrice,’ it is as though he said, ‘You are divorced with all divorces.’ As for the one taking an oath, there is no limit to the number of his oaths. Hence, they [i.e. divorcing and taking an oath] are different.” This is from Fath al-Bari. Hafiz [Ibn Hajar al-‘Asqalani] said: “And in sum, that which has occurred in this matter is exactly equivalent to what occurred in the matter of temporary marriage (mut‘ah). I mean the statement of Jabir that it used to be practised in the time of the Prophet (Allah bless him and grant him peace), Abu Bakr and at the start of the caliphate of ‘Umar. He said: ‘Then ‘Umar forbade us, so we refrained.’ Thus, the weightier [view] in both places is the prohibition of temporary marriage and the occurrence of three [divorces issued in one sitting], due to the consensus that occurred in the time of ‘Umar on that, and it has not been recorded that any, in the time of ‘Umar, opposed him in either of them. Their consensus proves the presence of an abrogating [text] – even if it was hidden to some of them before that – until it became manifest to them all in the time of ‘Umar. Thus, the opponent after this consensus is in violation of it [i.e. consensus], and the majority are upon [the view of] not taking into consideration one who introduces a disagreement after an [earlier] consensus. And Allah knows best.” Takmilah Fath al-Mulhim, 1:162-71 _____________________________

A family member told police about the three babies The bodies of three babies have been found in a basement freezer in the town of Wenden, in western Germany, prosecutors say. A woman believed to be the mother of the three has been arrested, a state prosecutor's office spokesman said. The three were not stillborn, police said, but the cause of death and the infants' ages have not been released. There have been several similar cases in Germany recently, including a woman jailed for killing her eight children. The babies appeared to have died shortly after birth and were in the freezer wrapped in plastic bags, the prosecutor's office said. Post-mortems are to be conducted to establish the cause of death, it added. '1988' One of the bags contained a newspaper from 1988, indicating the babies may have died that year, AFP news agency quoted police investigator Herbert Fingerhut as saying. Officials said a couple with three children aged 18 to 24 lived at the house. Two of the couple's adult children found the babies when they were looking for something to eat while their parents were out, police said. "They both decided to get a pizza and realised that the freezer had to be cleaned up because it was full of out-of-date food," Mr Fingerhut said. "It was then that they discovered the first bag." One of the couple's sons went with his parents to the police, who then searched the house and arrested the 44-year-old woman, who is believed to also be the mother of the three babies, German media have reported. It is not the first such case in Germany. Two years ago, the body of a dead toddler was found in the fridge of his drug-addicted parents in the northern city of Bremen. Also in 2006, a woman in eastern Germany was sentenced to 15 years in prison for killing eight of her babies. She had buried them in flower pots and a fish tank in the garden of her parents' home near the Polish border. E-mail this to a friend Printable version Bookmark with: Delicious Digg reddit Facebook StumbleUpon What are these?

CBS is well underway prepping the high-definition launch of Star Trek: Enterprise on Blu-Ray. As we previously reported, Enterprise was the only Star Trek series to be filmed natively at high-definition 1080p resolution (although FX shots were rendered at 720p), so CBS has a far easier job putting the show out on Blu-Ray in comparison to the monumental remastering of Star Trek: The Next Generation. A number of sources have informed TrekCore that Season 1 of Enterprise should be released in mid-late March 2013. Whilst the show was by no means as popular as The Next Generation, CBS have decided to commission another slew of brand-new bonus features to accompany the episodes on the Blu-Ray release. VAM [Value Added Material] Maestros Roger Lay Jr. and Robert Meyer Burnett – responsible for the great work on the TNG Blu-Ray special features – have been brought on board to give fans a candid, honest look at the show’s troubled inception. Here’s what we know so far about the Season 1 bonus features: The Season 1 set will boast a brand new 3-part documentary (similar to TNG Season 1’s “Stardate Revisited”) which we’ve been told is both epic , compelling and incredibly candid . , and . The Season 1 set will include a number of new audio commentaries (expect around 4 episodes to feature commentaries). Furthermore, the show’s Executive Producer Brannon Braga has revealed that Season 1’s fan-favorite episode “Shuttlepod One” will feature a commentary with Brannon , Connor Trinneer (Trip Tucker) and Dominic Keating (Malcolm Reed). This is very exciting news, hearing of a commentary featuring the two stars of that particular episode along with the episode’s writer and producer. [ UPDATE : We’ve confirmed there are in fact five new audio commentaries included with Season 1] (expect around 4 episodes to feature commentaries). Furthermore, the show’s Executive Producer Brannon Braga has revealed that Season 1’s fan-favorite episode “Shuttlepod One” will feature a commentary with , (Trip Tucker) and (Malcolm Reed). This is very exciting news, hearing of a commentary featuring the two stars of that particular episode along with the episode’s writer and producer. [ : We’ve confirmed there are in fact new audio commentaries included with Season 1] The Season 1 release is also set to include an unprecedented special discussion piece between executive producers Rick Berman and Brannon Braga. The lengthy piece, entitled “In Conversation” is described as refreshingly candid and “will be watched by the fanbase for years to come” according to Robert Meyer Burnett. Lay and Burnett have heavily engaged Enterprise‘s Executive Producer Brannon Braga with these features, and Brannon himself is actively asking the fanbase for suggestions to guide his input into the bonus features. If you have a particular request, an episode you want to hear audio commentary for or any burning questions you have about the show – post them below and we’ll make sure they get passed on! We’ll be featuring a special interview with VAM producer Robert Meyer Burnett soon, where he further discusses working on Star Trek Blu-Ray bonus features. We’ll also be bringing you a very special video interview we recorded with Brannon Braga back in October at the huge Destination London convention where Brannon spoke to us candidly at length about his time working inside the Star Trek franchise. Be sure to keep checking back at TrekCore for the latest news and developments relating to Enterprise‘s launch on Blu-Ray!

Spies and lies, especially against your allies Middle East Monitor Jonathan Jay Pollard. MEMO, December 23, 2010 Reports from the United States say that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is to ask for the release of convicted spy Jonathan Jay Pollard. A report in the New York Times claims that Pollard's release will be the subject of a "public request" to President Barack Obama; he was convicted in 1987 of spying for Israel and received a life sentence. Recent reports from Egypt speak of Israelis being charged in absentia of trying to recruit Syrian and Lebanese nationals for obvious purposes. There is no doubt that such things go on all the time around the world and we probably don't hear of most cases. What makes the Pollard case stand out is the fact that Israel recruited and employed a spy for espionage against its closest ally. While the whole spying business is very murky, you can at least understand why sworn enemies might want to spy on each other; but Israel spying on the United States of America? With friends like that, who needs enemies? Moreover, Pollard is not the only person convicted of spying for Israel in the US; around the same time, another US citizen, Ben-Ami Kadish was doing the same thing; he wasn't charged until 2008 but due to his advanced age by then (eighty-four years old) he was fined instead of being sent to prison. A former chief of the US Justice Department's internal security section claims that between 1950 and 1980, "the Israeli intelligence service... was the second most active in the United States"; the Soviet Union was in number one spot. There may well still be spies working in the US and passing secrets to Israel; the Zionist state's spy agency, Mossad, used forged passports of European allies in its assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh almost a year ago. Clearly, Israel has no qualms about treating its friends with contempt if it serves its own interests to do so. In fact, Israel has a history of this, sometimes with very bloody consequences. In June 1967 during the Six-Day War, for example, Israeli jets and motor torpedo boats attacked the USS Liberty in international waters 25 miles off the coast of Egypt. The Liberty was a floating intelligence platform - a spy ship clearly-marked and flying the US flag. The former ITN and BBC foreign correspondent Alan Hart wrote in his book Zionism: The real enemy of the Jews (volume two), that it had been sent there by the Johnson administration to let the Israelis know that it could monitor radio traffic and learn in advance of any plans to attack Syria; America feared Soviet intervention if that happened. An Israeli reconnaissance aircraft flew over the ship on 8th June, so low that members of the crew waved and saw the co-pilot wave and smile back. During the subsequent attack on the Liberty, 34 US servicemen were killed and 174 were wounded. Despite that, nobody has ever been brought to justice by the US or Israeli governments, leading to accusations of a high-level cover-up of the lethal attack, described by one Israeli general as "pure murder". Only the officer who gave the orders - General Moshe Dayan, according to Hart really knew the reasons why Israeli forces attacked a ship of its ally the United States. It could have had something to do with the plan to attack Syria and Dayan didn't want any witnesses, as Hart claims. However, it is known that while the Liberty was steaming up and down the Egyptian coats, using the minaret of the mosque in El-Arish as a reference point, Israeli troops were massacring Egyptian prisoners in the town. According to James Bamford in his book Body of Secrets, "three days after Israel launched the [Six-Day] war, Egyptian prisoners in the Sinai had become nuisances. There was no place to house them, not enough Israelis to watch them, and few vehicles to transport them." What did the Israelis do? "Israeli soldiers turned the town into a slaughterhouse, systematically butchering their prisoners." Bamford quotes Israeli military historian Aryeh Yitzhaki "he and other officers collected testimony from dozens of soldiers who admitted killing POWs". It is believed that as many as "1000 Egyptian prisoners in the Sinai," were killed by the Israelis, "including some 400 in the sand dunes of El-Arish." Americans and Egyptians were not the only victims of Israeli crimes during that period. As the Israeli troops advanced across Sinai, they met "a convoy of Indian peacekeepers, flying the blue United Nations flag". The Indian UN observers pulled over to let the Israelis pass. "As the Israelis approached... One of the tanks rotated its turret and opened fire from a few feet away. The Israeli tank then rammed its gun through the windshield of an Indian jeep and decapitated the two men inside. When other Indians went to aid their comrades, they were mowed down by machine-gun fire." When Israelis fired shells at UN compounds and schools in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead in 2008/9, they were repeating what their forebears had done in 1967: "In Gaza, Israeli tanks blasted six rounds into UN headquarters, which was flying the UN flag." Fourteen Indian UN peacekeepers were killed by Israel on that day. One of Israel's senior officers just south of El-Arish at the time of the massacre of prisoners and the attack on the USS Liberty was a certain Ariel Sharon. In 1995, when he was addressing the issue of Israeli war crimes, Sharon said, "Israel doesn't need this, and no one can preach to us about it - no one". In Body of Secrets, James Bamford says that "the extensive war crimes were just one of the deep secrets Israel had sought to conceal since the start of the [Six-Day War]." From the very beginning, he says, "an essential element in the Israeli battle plan seemed to have been to hide much of the war behind a carefully constructed curtain of lies. Lies about the Egyptian threat, lies about who started the war, lies to the American president, lies to the UN Security Council, lies to the press, lies to the public". Thus, adds Bamford, as the American naval historian Dr. Richard K. Smith noted in an article on the Liberty for United States Naval Institute Proceedings, "any instrument [i.e. the USS Liberty] which sought to penetrate this smoke screen so carefully thrown around the normal 'fog of war' would have to be frustrated". In the late nineties, during his first term of office, "Prime Minister Netanyahu's office declared: 'Israel does not use intelligence agents in the United States'." As Mr. Netanyahu prepares his "public request" for Jonathan Jay Pollard's release, one wonders how many other lies are being prepared to convince a very sceptical CIA and Obama administration that this will be in America's best interests. That won't bother Israel and the Israel lobby in the US, of course; their prime concern is the best interests of the Zionist state, regardless of who has to pay the price; allies, even one's most loyal supporter in every sense, are fair game. Spies and lies, especially against your allies is not only a snappy rhyming headline; for Zionists, it appears to be a way of life. Zionism: The real enemy of the Jews, volume two, by Alan Hart, World Focus Publishing, 2007 Body of Secrets: How America's NSA and Britain's GCHQ eavesdrop on the world, by James Bamford, Arrow Books, 2002 http://www.ussliberty.org/report/report.htm http://www.gtr5.com :: Article nr. 73214 sent on 24-dec-2010 18:11 ECT www.uruknet.info?p=73214 :: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website. The section for the comments of our readers has been closed, because of many out-of-topics. 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Harvey Weinstein at the Screen Actors Guild Awards in 2010 (Reuters photo: Danny Moloshok) Our Baby Boomer elites, mired in excess and safe in their enclaves, have overseen the decay of our core cultural institutions. Since the Trojan War, generations have always trashed their own age in comparison to ages past. The idea of fated decadence and decline was a specialty of 19th-century German philosophy. So we have to be careful in calibrating generations, especially when our own has reached a level of technology and science never before dreamed of (and it is not a given that material or ethical progress is always linear). Advertisement Advertisement Nonetheless, the so-called Baby Boomers have a lot to account for — given the sorry state of entertainment, sports, the media, and universities. The Harvey Weinstein episode revealed two generational truths about Hollywood culture. One, the generation that gave us the free-love and the anything-goes morals of Woodstock discovered that hook-up sex was “contrary to nature.” Sexual congress anywhere, any time, anyhow, with anyone — near strangers included — is not really liberating and can often be deeply imbedded within harassment and ultimately the male degradation of women. Advertisement Somehow a demented Harvey Weinstein got into his head that the fantasy women in his movies who were customarily portrayed as edgy temptresses and promiscuous sirens were reflections of the way women really were in Los Angeles and New York — or the way that he thought they should be. It was almost as if Weinstein sought to become as physically repulsive and uncouth as possible — all the better to humiliate (through beauty-and-the-beast asymmetry) the vulnerable and attractive women he coerced. Two, Weinstein reminded us, especially in his eleventh-hour medieval appeals for clemency by way of PC attacks on the NRA and Donald Trump, that mixing politics with art was, as our betters warned, always a self-destructive idea. Advertisement Hollywood ran out of original thought about three decades ago, and the people noticed and so keep avoiding the theaters. How many times can a good-looking, young, green progressive crusader expose a corporate pollution plot, or battle a deranged band of southern-twangy Neanderthals, South African racists, or Russian tattooed thugs, or a deep-state CIA cabal in sunglasses and shiny suits? How many times can the nth remake of a comic-book hero be justified by updating him into a caped social-justice warrior from L.A.? Ars gratia politicorum is suicide. Advertisement The ruling generation in Hollywood is out of creative ideas mostly because it invested in political melodrama rather than human tragedy. It cannot make a Western, not just because Santa Monica’s young men long ago lost the ability to sound or act like Texans in 1880, but because its politics have no patience with the real world of noble people who are often doomed, or flawed individuals who are nevertheless defined by their best rather than worst traits, or well-meaning souls who can cause havoc, or courageous men who fight for bad causes. Political correctness has become Maoist: All art must serve progressive struggle, defined in Hollywood as good race and gender warriors pitted against bad racists and sexists. Political correctness has become Maoist: All art must serve progressive struggle, defined in Hollywood as good race and gender warriors pitted against bad racists and sexists. The result is monotony and boredom. All the cleavage, flexed biceps, cheap obscenity, rap-music scores, and car crashes cannot hide that lack of an idea. Advertisement This generation’s NFL apparat, the ESPN commentariat, and the higher-education administrative cadre also reveal generational symptoms of exhaustion. They all have forgotten their original mission: respectively, athleticism; sports commentary; and inductive thinking, civic education, and disinterested inquiry. Instead, given their money and adulation, sports and colleges puffed themselves up as Olympians who from high could sermonize and implicitly insult their own patrons (fans, viewers, students, and alumni). Being ideologically correct was felt to bring more career dividends than being ethical, autonomous, or knowledgeable. It is hard to imagine that NFL commissioner Roger Goodell brings either wisdom or even common sense to his job. Thousands of everyday Americans could have just as easily destroyed the NFL for far less than Goodell’s tens of millions in compensation over the years. The NFL always had to be careful to square its self-created circle of enticing viewers to watch brutal gladiatorial games in an age when few have ever turned a live chicken into an evening meal. In a society where racial quotas and proportional representation are institutionalized as “diversity” and “inclusion,” the NFL was an odd exempt meritocracy of nearly 80 percent African-American players (or, in PC lingo, an exclusionary league that did not “look like” America). Advertisement In age when nearly everyone does his own Internet, video game, and minor sport thing, the NFL still assumed that millions would celebrate a national collective event on perpetual communal Sundays. Instead of being aware of its own inconsistencies and fragilities, the NFL bureaucracy rammed its extraneous agendas down the throat of America, as if twentysomething, half-educated multimillionaires were the moral superiors to those who paid their salaries. Politics are destroying the NFL. Ditto ESPN — the now-ossified sports-commentary network. Viewers do not demand graduate-school analyses from their sports commentators. They wanted some bruised ex-gladiators who knew the blood and smell of the arena to give them some firsthand insight into sports heroics. Instead, our generation of ESPN executives gave the worst of both worlds: nerds and failed pundits masquerading as Socratic sportscasters expounding cosmic theories about social justice, side by side with ex-jocks poorly mimicking them. No one should have to pay to watch that. Entertainment can be many things — if it is not grating. Today’s journalists graduate with majors that confer thinly disguised degrees in different sorts of activism. The problem with a dying media is not just new social media, the Internet, or 24-hour cable news. Those are just accelerants. The culprit is mostly politically driven ignorance. Today’s journalists graduate with majors that confer thinly disguised degrees in different sorts of activism. Advertisement Advertisement But -isms and -ologies come at a cost of shorting literature, history, or fact-based knowledge of any sort, so today’s journalistic doyens have few referents either of the past or in the abstract in general. The result is that every passing psychodrama becomes the most important in history. “Watergate” is a name dropped daily, but few journalists know anything about the genesis or nature of that scandal, the same way that referencing “Ferguson” omits its fraud and fantasies that even Eric Holder’s Justice Department was forced to concede. In the 1950s, the university had evolved beyond being a bastion of eccentricity, nonconformity, and free expression, as tweedy scholars and old-style elbow-patched liberal academics were displaced by hip voices railing against supposedly clueless straight culture. We lament political correctness and Stalinism on campuses, but the real crime is the ignorance that empowers it. America thought it could live with that — even at the price of watering down the curricula with -studies activist courses — because free speech was for everyone, at least in theory. But tenured radical professors eventually became sixty-something administrative bureaucrats and are now being devoured by the very radical offspring they have sired. We lament political correctness and Stalinism on campuses, but the real crime is the ignorance that empowers it. Advertisement The unspoken fuel that drives so many protests on campus is the self-awareness that so many students simply cannot do traditional college work and desire weaker courses, personal exemptions, and time off. A sense of student inferiority naturally leads to demands for everything but a more comprehensive education. The result of politicizing mediocrity is the classic toxicity of youthful ignorance and arrogance. Twenty-somethings brag about tearing down the statue of Robert E. Lee without a clue what Gettysburg was. Disrupting a conservative lecturer on campus is the current generation’s version of cramming phone booths and swallowing goldfish. Orwellian administrative language, sanctioned from those who should have known better, masks an anti-democratic reality of which even its adherents are ashamed. “Safe spaces” mean segregation. “Affirmative action” is synonymous with implicit racial quotas. “Theme houses” are race-based apartheid living quarters. “Trigger warnings” are censorship. “Student loans” are paramount to indentured servitude for over a decade. And “diversity” ensures monotony and orthodoxy in thought and expression. University overseers managed to ensure that the B.A. degree is no longer necessarily proof of education in science, math, language, history, or philosophy. Private employers see elite colleges, at best, not necessarily as places where job applicants were educated or trained, but rather where they were once prescreened by colleges, on the basis of high-school test scores and GPAs. So they hire college graduates by brand names, because earlier, as incoming students, they were once admitted to, rather than graduated from, a good college on some sort of objective basis. Employers write off what followed later as either a wasted four years or irrelevant. What caused this societal meltdown among our Boomer custodians? It was not material want. Our inheritance ensured we were the most affluent and leisured generation in history. Rather, excess led to hubris. We masked incompetence with snazzy technology and the elite’s ability to travel and acquire at will — and to sound hip and “with it” in speech and diction. Our generation also, inevitably, became divorced from both nature and the muscularity of the physical, desperate ordeal of surviving. The result was a vicarious romance about the wild and an ignorance of and disdain for those who must fight the wild to produce our food, wood, steel, concrete, and fuel. The result, again, is a vicarious life. Silicon Valley grandees pontificate about open borders, “undocumented migrants,” and “sanctuary cities,” but beneath their noses are streets lined with tightly parked Winnebagoes in which thousands of poor Mexican nationals sleep, live, eat, and prep for another day servicing the masters of the universe. To suggest that the geography of the Bay Area is still vast and its open spaces ripe for affordable housing is the heresy of “how dare you even suggest getting near my Portola Valley estate”? Our culture and financial elite are primarily a coastal tribe, cut off from both the poor and the material conditions that face the poor. They find penance and exemption for their privilege in loud but empty virtue-signaling and in easy contempt for the supposedly grasping middle class. But what we wanted from them was excellence, competence, and leadership; yet they had neither the education nor character for any of that. It is hard to destroy the NFL or to discredit a liberal-arts degree from Yale, or to turn NBC or CNN into a bastard of Pravda or to make the Hollywood of John Ford, Frank Capra, and Alfred Hitchcock into that of George Clooney. But we managed it — and more still to come before we are through.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has said he would not like to see the Government’s confidence and supply arrangement with Fianna Fáil “drop dead” the day after next year’s budget. The agreement with Fianna Fáil, which is central to the functioning of the Fine Gael-led minority Government, runs up to the budget in October 2018 and Mr Varadkar said he and Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin would have to have a conversation “at a certain point”. A review is built into the arrangement agreed between Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil in the 10 week negotiations following the February 2016 general election which resulted in no clear majority for any party or grouping. Under confidence and supply, a party or group in parliament typically agrees to back a government on confidence votes and on spending votes, such as budgets. Mr Varadkar told journalists that the confidence and supply arrangement with Fianna Fáil could “potentially” be continued “and I certainly see no reason why it can’t be continued beyond the third budget”. He said it was a conversation he would first have to have with Mr Martin and then with their two parties. Asked if he would have that conversation in the first quarter of 2018, Mr Varadkar replied: “Not the first quarter no, but I wouldn’t like to see it drop dead the day after the budget either.” He added: “That wouldn’t be in anyone’s interest and it would not be in the best interests of the country certainly to have a Government on budget night with a confidence and supply agreement but not the day after.” He said “I imagine that conversation will be had at some stage next year but it is not a conversation I have had yet with Micheal Martin so I probably should have it first.”

Clint Hill played a key role as Rangers earned a 2-1 win over Hearts at Ibrox Rangers' Clint Hill has expressed his disappointment at not being offered a new deal by boss Pedro Caixinha. The 38-year-old joined Rangers in the summer but does not feature in Caixinha's plans and will leave when his deal ends in a few weeks. "I will be moving on, unfortunately," Hill said. "Obviously you are a little bit disappointed (at no deal) because when you play at such a big club you want it to last as long as possible." Former QPR, Crystal Palace and Stoke City defender Hill was in fine form on Saturday as Rangers beat Hearts 2-1 at Ibrox, making a number of timely blocks to help earn his side three points. Joe Garner gave the Ibrox men an early lead and Barrie McKay won it after Esmael Goncalves levelled for 10-man Hearts. Hill scored a late leveller to earn Rangers a point against Celtic in March The win ensure Rangers will finish third this season and while Hill was happy to make it two victories in succession, he knows the season has not gone to plan. The Englishman joined the club under previous boss Mark Warburton, who left Ibrox in February, and has been a popular figure with the Rangers fans. He scored a late goal to earn Rangers a point away to Celtic in March and revealed he loved his time at the Glasgow outfit. "It has been hard on the pitch in terms of performances but it has been brilliant for me to play at this club, and to play in front of the fans has been a big highlight for me," Hill added. "I have been in football long enough to know that when a new manager comes in they have different ideas, so I am just trying to enjoy every minute as if it's my last. "I can only wish the club all the best and hopefully see them get back to the top sooner rather than later."

by Micah J. Fleck It started with the Facebook page Being Libertarian, and has now grown to a threefold effort between BL, Occupy Democrats Logic, and Capitalism. What is currently happening on social media involving these communities is a brushfire of voluntary giving and libertarian pride that should excite and empower all libertarians who believe non-coerced charity is possible and noble. A woman named Briana needs surgery on her left eye in order to save it. But thanks to Obamacare, the premiums for the insurance are much too high for she and her husband to afford. So, they turned to fundraising in the long-shot hopes that someone out there might be generous enough to give and help. Being Libertarian Director Nathaniel Owen stumbled upon the couple’s GoFundMe campaign and decided to share it with his page’s followers. What happened next, even he didn’t fully anticipate: people gave. And they gave a lot. Since first drawing attention to the campaign last night, Being Libertarian has managed to raise over half of the total needed expenses for Briana’s eye surgery through its readership. A quick scroll through Briana’s GoFundMe page‘s donor list will prove just how tightly involved the libertarian circle was in getting this campaign (now trending) off the ground– every other accompanying comment reads “taxation is theft.” It’s something of a handshake between those people who are in the know. And the best part is… Briana and her husband’s politics have not even come up during any of this. The libertarian community has reached out and given financial help purely out of the goodness of their hearts; not out of some obligation to help their own due to primitive political camaraderie. After this fundraiser, which will hopefully be fully and successfully funded largely through the efforts of libertarian voluntarism (the deadline is December 15th), may we all not soon forget the impact that liberty-minded solidarity can have on a life. Owen himself reported that the couple behind the fundraising campaign had contacted them, with Briana’s husband saying the following: “I don’t know if you are religious, but we have been praying for something extraordinary to happen.” And something extraordinary, this is. But this is precisely what a fully unfettered libertarian society could do in even more frequency and abundance — give to the right causes. Directly. Without coercion. Without force. This is the libertarianism everyone always talks about but the outsiders rarely see; this is the libertarianism of altruism without coercion. Of human decency without the need for taxation. Of kindness, love, and positive proselytism. And it’s about time this became the norm. Hopefully this is just the beginning.

“’Sugar babies are escorts,” said Tammy Castle, a professor at James Madison University whose research includes analyzing the content of escort websites. “[The administrators of the Seeking Arrangement] are trying to avoid the negative stigma of prostitution by advertising this as just another dating website, but money is exchanged for arrangements that may include sex.” In 2013, Seeking Arrangement announced that approximately 44 percent of its 2.3 million “babies” are in college. This is a trend that the website encourages—if babies register with a .edu email account, they receive a free premium membership (something the guys have to shell out as much as $1,200 for). Seeking Arrangement creates the illusion that the sexual element of these relationships isn’t forced, but organic. No one associated with the website wants to admit that what it’s doing is facilitating sex-for-money exchanges. The large number of college women on the site helps preserve this illusion, for both the daddies and the babies. “Dating a college woman fulfills these guys’ wildest dreams. They want someone highly educated who is eager to learn,” said Parinda Wanitwat, director of the documentary Daddies Date Babies, which profiles several college sugar babies living in New York City. In almost every message Amanda receives on Seeking Arrangement, sugar daddies comment on how intelligent she sounds in her profile. Amanda has met more than 50 men through the site. All of them are well-educated, the majority are business executives. When she first signed up for Seeking Arrangement, Sarah, another sugar baby who recently graduated from college, was surprised by how many men sent her messages. Sarah has a curvy figure and is originally from Southeast Asia. She expected the men to be interested in girls who were skinny, blonde, and white—“sorority Barbies.” “That’s just not me,” she said. And yet, Sarah got a lot of attention on Seeking Arrangement. So did Sophie, a 27-year-old graduate student in New York City. She describes herself as an intellectual with pretentious glasses and curly brown hair. “I look like what I am, and the men like that,” Sophie said. “They want someone who doesn’t look like a bimbo.” On Seeking Arrangement, intellect is important—maybe even more important than looks. If the sugar baby can understand what the “daddy” does at work and engage in topics he finds interesting, he is more likely to feel he’s in a real relationship. “The guys eventually want to feel like, ‘That girl likes me for me,’” Amanda said. While some men on the site use it exclusively for sex, the majority want sex and something else. They want someone to come along on business trips, go to company events, and meet their friends—someone who understands and appears interested in what they have to say. Most importantly, they want someone who will help them pretend that the relationship is not a transaction. Only one sugar baby I interviewed said she discussed her fee upfront, on the first date. The rest said they preferred to let the issue of compensation “come up naturally.”

The Russian navy has the potential to damage the West’s economy and way of life, says Sir Stuart Peach, senior NATO figure and head of Britain’s armed forces. Stuart Peach warns that Russia could cut off the internet to NATO countries and inflict serious damage to the telecom infrastructure sharing. Russian ships have been spotted in the Atlantic Ocean near the cables that guarantee communications between United Stated and the Old Continent (as well as other parts of the world). “There is a new risk to our way of life, which is the vulnerability of the cables that crisscross the sea beds. Can you imagine a scenario where those cables are cut and disrupted, which would immediately and potentially catastrophically affect both our economy and other ways of living,” said Sir Stuart Peach during the annual RUSI conference. Stuart Peach also urged NATO to build new and modern submarines in order to respond Russia’s navy modernisation. The think tank Policy Exchange has recently published a report which said that 97 percent of global communication are carried by cables lying under the Oceans. Many analysts, however, think the presence of the Russian navy could be just trying to gather intelligence and intercept communication. Thank you for visit The Business Globalist. Our articles are totally free and we want to continue to offer precious information for everyone, without any paywall. If you think this article has been useful you may consider to make a little donation to support free journalism. You can make a donation at the Paypal account del-gatto@hotmail.com

(Greenstone & Looney/The Hamilton Project) (Greenstone & Looney/The Hamilton Project) Catherine Crampell at The New York Times Economix blog pointed to a disturbing article Thursday. It shows that full-time male workers in the United States were making less in real, that is, inflation-adjusted, dollars in 2009 than they were in 1969. But the picture is even worse than that. When you take into account all men aged 25-64, whether they are working full time or not, they are making far less in real dollars in 2009 than they were four decades ago. Unsurprisingly, the less education they have, the worse off they are. The chart above shows just how bad it is. The bottom-line: Wages for men have not just stagnated over the past four decades, they've slipped. And this is true regardless of education. These data come from an article by Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney, both of the Brookings Institution and the Hamilton Project, the latter founded in 2006 by Robert Rubin to set forth an agenda of centrist economics for Democratic administrations to adopt. They write: Over the past 40 years, a period in which U.S. GDP per capita more than doubled after adjusting for inflation, the annual earnings of the median prime-aged male has actually fallen by 28 percent. Indeed, males at the middle of the wage distribution now earn about the same as their counterparts in the 1950s! This decline reflects both stagnant wages for men on the job, and the fact that, compared with 1969, three times as many men of working age don’t work at all. [...] Standard economic theory tells us that it is a consequence of reduced earnings opportunities and/or a greater desire to spend time out, broadening global markets brought opportunities that increasingly educated American workers raced to embrace. This resulted in steadily rising living standards, generations of children who out-earned their parents, and a thriving middle class. While some say that the change could be from people—men, in this case—changing their life-styles out of a desire for more leisure or because they prefer to have their spouse bring in the cash while they take care of the kids or watch day-time television and eat bon-bons, Greenstone and Looney say the evidence points to the "primary cause" as being lost opportunity. That loss is far greater for men with less education. Forty years ago, a college degree bought a man, on average, a lifetime income 55 percent higher than for his counterpart with only a high school diploma. Forty years later, the gap had more than doubled to 116 percent. We're familiar with many of the reasons for this. Technological change, globalization that has shifted jobs requiring less skills to emerging economies overseas, higher productivity from automation and the arrival of the "knowledge age" have all made it tougher on men without a degree. Those without a high school diploma? Well, they're paddle-less up the proverbial creek. And it seems to be getting worse. Labor-market dropouts are more likely to be low skilled and less educated: nonemployment among men without high school diplomas increased by 23 percentage points (from 11 to 34 percent) and among those with only a high school degree by 18 percentage points (from 4 to 22 percent). Thus, the biggest declines in employment occurred among those groups that also had the biggest declines in market wages, suggesting the same economic forces may be at work. [...] (Greenstone & Looney/The Hamilton Project) workers is really an outright decline in wages for the median men of working age. The median wage of the American male has declined by almost $13,000 after accounting for inflation in the four decades since 1969. (Using a different measure of inflation suggests a smaller, but still substantial, drop in earnings.) Indeed, earnings haven’t been this low since Ike was president and Marshal Dillon was keeping the peace in Dodge City. For the high school drop-out, the plunge in real-dollar earnings between now and 1969 is a horrific 66 percent. For the man with a high-school diploma it's 47 percent. And yet, despite these astonishing numbers, the percentage of men graduating from college is nearly unchanged for the past 35 years. While the magnitude of such statistics may leap out at you, it's no real surprise that lower-skilled Americans have seen this drop in their earnings abilities as many of the kinds of jobs they could have gotten 40 years ago no longer exist in the United States. Chalk that up to all those factors already mentioned and add to it an emphasis on a free-trade policy that many observers consider to be a wrong-headed and unfair approach. It gives away American jobs and kills small and medium-sized businesses while enriching the more flexible U.S.-based corporations and their foreign subsidiaries as well as the financial industry where so much gross domestic product has shifted. It's what some dare to call the natural order of things that cannot be stopped. Then there's that other disturbing bit of data in the numbers. Median income even for college-educated, full-time workers is down 2 percent since 1969, 7 percent down for all college-educated workers and 12 percent down for all working-age men with a college degree, including those who, for whatever reason, aren't working. What's that about? Too many visas handed out to highly skilled foreigners who will work for less than their citizen counterparts? Decades of union-busting as well as outright disdain for unions by well-educated professionals in the private sector? Greed on the part of those who are determined to continue transferring wealth ever upward at the expense of a middle-class earners even when killing off the middle-class weakens the economy and ultimately the underpinnings of what made the wealthy wealthy? Creative destruction that is much more destructive than creative? Greenstone and Looney don't have an answer. For the less skilled workers, they offer the usual nostrums to improve things. These are reasonable if pedestrian. Most people should finish high school, they say. Getting there means more emphasis on educational attainment at every level, from pre-school on. And after that, there should be more training for people who are not college bound at places such as career academies, and community colleges, which, they explain "can play a vital role in improving the earnings of transitioning workers." Well, yes, they can play such a role. And for many they still do. But, no offense intended, have the authors looked recently at what's happening to many community colleges these days? Increased tuition, increased class sizes, fewer class offerings, and the hiring of more adjunct professors making less money are not exactly conducive to raising skills. Clearly, having more and better skills is a good thing, an investment in the future as the cliché would have it. But there's a real world out here that needs to be remembered. And in that world, as the earnings statistics for college-educated men show, just getting more education and more training doesn't solve all the problems. Particularly the problem of where to actually get a job. Centrist solutions don't help with that. They never have.

President Barack Obama being introduced to speak at the White House Summit on Worker Voice in Washington on Wednesday. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque President Barack Obama's stance of calling on Syrian President Bashar Assad to transition out of power while maintaining basic government functions after he's ousted is a "fantasy" in the context of how the country works, according to Tony Badran, a researcher at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. "The biggest myth out there is the existence of 'state institutions' separate from Assad," Badran said in an interview. "The reality is, once you concede the regime, you inevitably concede Assad." Months after the Syrian civil war erupted in 2011, Obama called for Assad to step down to hasten an end to the violence. Russia and Iran — key Assad allies — objected, resulting in a 2012 UN communique negotiated in Geneva that implicitly allowed Assad to remain in power as part of a "transitional governing body" that would include members of the opposition and ultimately hold free and fair elections. This, the Russians asserted, would allow the Syrian people to decide their future for themselves. Operating under the impression that Moscow and Tehran would work with the Syrian regime to implement this agreement, in which the regime would remain mostly intact while Assad was transitioned out, Obama softened his stance on the Syrian president. This idealistic quid pro quo, however, "betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how Syria works," Badran said. As Badran has said in the past, there is no "deep state" independent of the Assads that could keep the country running. Therefore, Badran said, any notion to the contrary "betrays a poor understanding of how that family has engineered the regime over the past 40 years." "It also shows a lack of understanding of the sources and structure of power within the Alawite community itself," Badran added, referring to the Alawite religious clan that makes up about 12% of Syria's population. "They don't call it 'Souriya al-Assad,'" or Assad's Syria, "for nothing." Rabe, a Syrian refugee who obtained asylum in the US, described to Business Insider just how pervasive the Assad family was in Syria: "Since I was born, I only knew one president all my life — Hafez Al-Assad, the father of Bashar Al-Assad." President Hafez Assad with his family in the early 1970s. Left to right: Bashar, Maher, Anisa Makhlouf, Majd, Bushra, and Bassel. Syrian government "Every day at school from first grade till graduation from high school, we used to stand in the morning to salute the Syrian flag and say the Baath party mottos and goals," said Rabe, who requested to be identified by only his first name. "In the end we had to say 'our president forever: the great one Haffez Al Assad' three times before going to class." "When he died, I couldn't believe it — I thought, 'he is an immortal, he can't be dead. He is forever.'" 'Living in a fantasy' Both Russia and Iran have vested interests in preserving this system and its institutions as they stand. That means, implicitly, that they need Assad to remain in power. Syria's port of Tartus, the only warm-water port Russia retained after the collapse of the Soviet Union, is a key foothold for Moscow to continue projecting power into the Mediterranean. If Assad is removed, there's a chance the port will remain under Russian control. Economically, the numbers speak for themselves: Roughly 80% of the Assad regime's military equipment has been purchased from Russia, whose economic interests in Syria totaled about $20 billion as of June 2012. Bashar Assad with Russian President Vladimir Putin. AP And as Iran's most crucial ally in the region, the Assad regime is critical to Iran's retaining its bridge to Hezbollah in Lebanon and preserving its geopolitical influence along the eastern Mediterranean. The Iranians see Assad as "the only guarantor of Iranian influence and support for Hezbollah," Mustafa Alani, the director of security and defense studies at the Geneva-based Gulf Research Center, told The Wall Street Journal last week. To that end, Tehran spends as much as $35 billion a year propping up the regime and has deployed thousands of pro-Assad Shiite militiamen to Syria since the conflict began in 2011. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, right, with Syrian parliament speaker Jihad al-Laham at the start of their meeting in Tehran, Iran. Iranian Presidency Office/AP Given how invaluable Assad is to preserving Iranian and Russian interests in Syria — and to countering American hegemony in the Middle East — any promises Moscow and Tehran may have made to the Obama administration regarding his ouster were inherently disingenuous. "There is no regime without Assad, so if the Obama administration ever believed the Russians and the Iranians when they said they would try to transition Assad out, they were living in a fantasy," Badran said. "If you take Assad out, the whole system collapses." But Obama evidently believed that, as Bloomberg's Josh Rogin reported last week: "Obama administration officials have been telling the Russians and the Iranians for over a year that the US would not object to an expanded security role for them inside Syria ... in exchange for Russian and Iranian helping to move Assad out of power." In reality, Badran said, "Russia and Iran got the concessions that they wanted by telling the US what it wanted to hear." 'Ways to prop up Assad by force' The dynamics of the war changed drastically last week when Russian warplanes started bombing US-backed rebels in Syria's west and north under the guise of bombing ISIS. Though Putin and Obama had reportedly agreed about fighting ISIS and opening lines of communication between their militaries to prevent an accidental conflict, Washington has had to learn the hard way that the priority for Russia and Iran has always been to shore up Assad. The Institute for the Study of War As it turns out, a joint plan between Russia and Iran to save Assad had been in the works for months. By September, Iranian military mastermind Qassem Soleimani had already traveled to Moscow several times to discuss the plan's logistics with Putin directly. This means "Tehran and Moscow had been discussing ways to prop up Assad by force even as Western officials were describing what they believed was new flexibility in Moscow's stance on his future," Reuters' Laila Bassam and Tom Perry reported. On Wednesday, the Syrian army — bolstered by Iran-backed troops and newly deployed Russian "advisers" — launched its first ground offensive against Syrian rebels with Russian air cover, while additional Russian airstrikes destroyed the main weapons depots of the US-backed rebel group Suqour al-Jabal. Putin with Rouhani at the welcoming ceremony during a summit of Caspian Sea regional leaders in Astrakhan, Russia, in 2014. REUTERS/Alexei Nikolsky/RIA Novosti/Kremlin "Obama's vision has always been based on integrating rather than keeping out, and he has never wanted to be on a war footing," Badran said. "He thinks he is improving the situation by 'sharing the burden' with Russia and Iran." In reality, however, the influence Obama has afforded to Russia and Iran in Syria — in the good faith that they would work to transition Assad out of power — has helped drive the conflict to a new level. "We've already moved one step beyond a proxy war, where the Americans/Europeans and Russians are arming two opposing sides in a war ... to where the Russians are now directly fighting Western proxies," geopolitical expert Ian Bremmer, president of Eurasia Group, told Business Insider by email. "The danger is that we move one step further still."

Many conservative politicians and commentators argue Indigenous ranger jobs are not “real jobs”. This is perfectly illustrated by the recent leaking to Crikey of a secret federal Coalition government plan to radically change this successful Indigenous ranger program in order to “get participants into employment”. While the minister for Indigenous affairs, Nigel Scullion has denied he is planning an overhaul of the program, his government has not made a commitment to fund the program beyond 2018. This question of whether ranger jobs are “real jobs” can easily be put to rest. The Numbulwar ranger group in Arnhem Land was re-established in November 2015, having been forced into abeyance for the previous three years due to a lack of infrastructure funding to provide a ranger base and ranger coordinator accommodation. The Northern Land Council (NLC) manages and employs the rangers (along with 16 other ranger groups) and receives commonwealth working on country program funding for wages and operational funding but nothing for the provision of essential infrastructure (unlike most other government-funded regional service providers operating in remote communities). Coalition denies it is planning to overhaul Indigenous ranger program Read more An application to fill infrastructure gaps at Numbulwar and other places was lodged by the NLC in March 2015, assessed by Department Prime Minister and Cabinet in October 2015, recommended by them in November the same year and has been with the minister for Indigenous affairs ever since. The community has been continuously agitating and lobbying for the re-establishment of their ranger group as it provided much sought-after jobs in the community and helped them to look after their traditional lands. In November last year, the NLC managed to negotiate some temporary accommodation with the commonwealth government engagement officer and Numbulwar Homelands Association and convince a retired biodynamic dairy farmer from Margaret River in Western Australia to accept the challenge of taking up the ranger coordinator position on a short-term casual basis. All four of the previously employed rangers immediately signed up again. Another two part-time positions and six seasonal casual positions were offered, equally for men and women. In a community with precious few jobs there were another 12 real jobs created, the only depressing aspect being the 20 or so applicants who were turned away. Eventually the local community would like to establish their own local corporation to employ the rangers and care for their country directly and are slowly building their governance, organisation capacity and resources to achieve this. The NLC plays an important role in helping communities build their governance structures and organisation capacity to achieve these goals. In the meantime, the rangers work program and priorities are overseen by the senior traditional owners of the area to leverage their traditional knowledge about how to best care for country. Central to this is the preservation of their language, traditional knowledge and cultural practices and a core part of the rangers work program is to assist with providing cross-cultural education and capacity building within their communities. This is no different to the work of social workers and community liaison officers employed by state and local government authorities to support large ethnic communities throughout Australia. Environmental works include patrolling hundreds of miles of shoreline along the western Gulf of Carpentaria monitoring marine debris for invasive pests and removing drift nets that entrap and kill marine turtles, fish and other animals. This is fee for service work. No delivery – no pay. Rangers take traditional owners on country in the early dry season to conduct landscape scale ground and aerial burning operations to protect outstations and sacred sites, conserve biodiversity and earn carbon credits through the Arnhem Land carbon abatement project to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (the irony of traditional land management practices being re-applied to help stop global warming is not lost on anyone). This work is conducted in an open market environment which pays on results. A new vessel is being purchased to conduct fisheries surveillance and compliance patrols under a commercial contract arrangement with the Northern Territory Department of Fisheries. Preliminary planning is underway to establish a small crocodile farm and feral buffalo meat supply company to supply the local community, similar to other ranger groups in Arnhem Land (less the grand scale of development the Coalition’s “Develop the North” envisages and more a community-led social enterprise supporting local aspirations and needs). These rangers have completed industry-accredited workplace health and safety skills and certificate training (such as Coxswains grade 2 certificates, radio operators certificate and first aid certificate) to safely complete their work. We learned how to track bilbies and we saw a burrow! This is amazing! | First Dog on the Moon Read more These are some examples of the rangers gaining the essential workplace skills and accreditations to undertaking the same work their national park, council reserve and small business operator colleagues do. If these aren’t real jobs then the the ideologues and commentators will need to tell that to social workers, community liaison officers, national park rangers, local shire workers maintaining council reserves (and Anzac memorial shrines) or private contractors fulfilling government contracts. Or is it really more about whose development agenda is being fulfilled, whose memorials, historic events and celebrations are being honoured and maintained and whose land is being cared for? Until they’re all of ours we remain a divided and, dare I say, racially divided country. Indigenous rangers play a silent and undervalued role as leaders and educators in their communities, role models for how to progress in both worlds. It’s important to provide local, challenging, culturally relevant, real jobs to keep these leaders embedded within the fabric of their families and communities. They need a commitment beyond 2018 that their real jobs will still exist.

About this workshop Are you interested in the application of CFD in Formula Student and Formula SAE? Would you like to learn how to develop a car design using a revolutionary cloud-based simulation software? SimScale and Formula Student Germany have joined forces to offer a free workshop about the application of CFD in Formula Student. During the 4-session course, students will receive a hands-on, interactive introduction to the fundamentals of race car aerodynamics and CFD from leading motorsport aerodynamics experts. Completing the course will enable participants to create precise CFD simulations of their car design and improve their own CFD methodology. Submitting a homework assignment (multiple choice quiz) will qualify you for a Certificate of Completion. No prior knowledge or software is required to join this webinar. All participants can get free access to SimScale with all the required simulation features by creating a Community account on our website. If you are unable to attend the live sessions, we would still encourage you to register in order to receive the recordings. In collaboration with:

From the tortillas to the salsa to the chips and marinades, everything served at Chipotle will now be GMO-free. Starting Monday, the Mexican fast food chain will only serve food that’s devoid of genetically modified ingredients, The New York Times reports. This will be a first for a major restaurant chain. “This is another step toward the visions we have of changing the way people think about and eat fast food,” the company’s co-CEO Steve Ells told the Times. “Just because food is served fast doesn’t mean it has to be made with cheap raw ingredients, highly processed with preservatives and fillers and stabilizers and artificial colors and flavors.” Chipotle has reportedly been working for years to become GMO-free. In 2013, the company became the first restaurant chain to disclose all GMO-containing ingredients on its menu. “Genetically modified foods hold out promises that are at best untested, and at worst unrealistic,” Ells wrote in a blog post last year. “Traditional edible plants and animals have evolved alongside humans over thousands of years to provide the people who eat them with essential nourishment. In exchange for this, we have an obligation to those plants and animals to keep caring for them responsibly. For most of our history, it's been a great deal for all involved. And we'd like to help keep it that way.” According to CNNMoney, Chipotle’s pork and chicken will still come from animals that eat GMO-feed. However, the chain says its been successful in switching out all other GMO-containing ingredients from its menu, including swapping soybean oil for GMO-free sunflower oil and rice bran oil.

Cristal Paulette Richardson told jurors at her murder trial that she doesn’t recall everything that happened when she stabbed Cedric Lamont Owens 130 times and castrated him inside a Far East Dallas motel room. But she’s not at a total loss to explain her actions that night in April 2012. “I do know that I didn’t chase this man like a dog. I didn’t want him to kill me,” Richardson said tearfully. “I’m not a killer. I’m not a murderer. I’m somebody’s mother.” Richardson, 29, testified Friday in a Dallas County courtroom that she acted in self-defense because, she said, Owens attacked and raped her. She said the two, who had known each other less than 12 hours, had spent part of the night together and she used cocaine, PCP, marijuana and alcohol. She said she blacked out so she doesn’t remember all the details of what happened the rest of the night but testified that she was not high at the time of the slayings. But Dallas County prosecutors Josh Healy and Brandi Mitchell said while questioning Richardson that her faulty memory is just her way of only telling the jury facts that aid her version of events. Police responding to the motel that night found Owens’ bloody and naked body inside the motel room. In addition to the stab wounds and castration, his throat had also been cut, authorities said. Richardson, who was also naked and covered in blood, was sitting outside in a stairwell. She testified Friday that the events leading up to that point began when Owens thought she had been part of ripping him off when he paid someone she knew $60 for cocaine that turned out to be baking soda. She told jurors that Owens, 34, raped her in the motel room — which a friend had rented to celebrate her birthday — while wearing a condom and told her “that’s for my money lost, [expletive].” Richardson said after the rape, she grabbed the condom and threw the sperm inside at Owens. He punched her in the nose and they began fighting. She told jurors that she grabbed a knife because she was scared and he took it from her. During the fight, she grabbed it back from him, she testified. “He kept telling me he was going to kill me,” she testified. “I felt my life was in danger.” She said that every time Owens came at her, she stabbed him. She said that she doesn’t remember stabbing him 130 times or castrating him. Richardson also told jurors that her birth father raped her when she was 13 and that she was sexually assaulted as an adult by a man who followed her and then dragged her into an alley. The rape as a child was not reported to police. The one as an adult was reported to Dallas police but the assailant was not caught, she testified. Jurors also learned that Richardson has prior convictions for DWI with a child in the car, theft, aggravated assault with a knife and credit card abuse. But they did not hear many details of those crimes. Although Richardson, who also sustained knife injuries, was supposed to be on medication for schizoaffective disorder, she testified that she had not taken it at the time of the killing. Richardson mainly kept her composure on the stand, constantly concluding her answers with the word “sir” when answering questions from Healy or her attorney, Paul Johnson. At times, though, she swore when quoting what she or others said before or after Owens was killed. At one point in her testimony, she addressed Owens’ family, telling them that she was sorry. During cross-examination, Healy asked how she got her injuries and which hand Owens stabbed or hit her with. Richardson said she didn’t know because she was curled up in a ball trying to protect her head as he kicked her back and vagina. “We weren’t playing ‘Ring Around the Rosie,’ ” she told Healy. “We were fighting, sir.” Testimony is expected to resume Monday morning. Richardson faces up to life in prison if convicted.

ANALYSIS/OPINION: Earlier this year when Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and the National Rifle Association’s Wayne LaPierre addressed the NRA’s annual meeting both claimed that if she ever becomes president, Hillary Clinton will do all in her power to eviscerate or, in Mr. Trump’s words, “abolish” the Second Amendment to the Constitution. Mrs. Clinton and her supporters called the charges lies and claim there is no evidence that she wants to do either. While one has to parse every word uttered by Mrs. Clinton to find where she really stands, her position on the individual right of Americans to “keep and bear arms” is far clearer than she might like it to be, which may explain why in a recent national poll 38 percent of Americans listed an attack on their Second Amendment rights as their “greatest fear.” Mr. LaPierre claimed, “If she could, Hillary would ban every gun, destroy every magazine [and] put your name on a government registration list.” To do that, however, she would have to change the makeup of the United States Supreme Court. He put the consequences in stark terms: “If she gets her hands on the Supreme Court and stacks it with just one more justice we’ll be kissing our Second Amendment freedom goodbye.” The charge, claimed Mrs. Clinton and her allies, is absurd, arguing that she had never said she would actually “abolish” the Second Amendment. She and her supporters are right in a very narrow Clintonian sense. One’s reading of her words depends on their meaning as she interprets them. Mrs. Clinton has never said outright that she wants the words of the Second Amendment erased — just reinterpreted in a way that would accomplish exactly the same thing. What she has said is that the landmark 2008 Supreme Court decision recognizing that the Founders included the Second Amendment in our Bill of Rights to prevent the government from denying citizens the individual right to “keep and bear arms” to defend themselves, their families and their homes was “wrongly decided.” Her later claim in the third debate that she was upset only because all the D.C. government was trying to do was “protect the toddlers” was both disingenuous and had no relation whatever to either the D.C. law or the Supreme Court decision. The case was District of Columbia v. Heller, and the one question the court addressed in that case was whether the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a handgun in the home for self-defense. In a 5-4 decision, the court said it does, with the four dissenting justices arguing that there is no such right. To argue that the case was “wrongly decided” is to argue that no individual in this country has a constitutional right to possess a firearm to defend himself, herself or their family and home. Had the court bought that argument in Heller, the constitutional protection of individual firearms ownership would, in effect, have been abolished. The progressive left was outraged by the Heller decision and a subsequent decision “incorporating” the guarantees of the Second Amendment through the due process clause so that they, like those found in the First and Fourth Amendments, and other Bill of Rights protections, apply to the states as well as the federal government. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg who, like Mrs. Clinton, feels the Heller decision was “wrongly decided,” wants Heller reversed and believes, as do American gun owners, that a Clinton court would reverse it. Since then, Mrs. Clinton has pivoted to insist that what she really wants is the sort of “common-sense” restrictions on firearms sales, transfers and ownership that President Obama favors, along with a ban on the sale of so-called “assault weapons,” and a ban on the sale of any firearms to those whose names make it on to the government’s various watch lists. She insists that such restrictions are constitutional because as the Supreme Court observed in Heller, even fundamental rights are subject to “reasonable” restriction. This begs the question of who decides what is and is not “reasonable” when it comes to such restrictions. Even though the First Amendment protecting free speech allows “reasonable” restrictions on that right, the reasonableness of any restriction is decided by the federal courts and makes presidential judicial appointments incredibly important. In Mrs. Clinton’s mind, such “reasonable” restrictions on Second Amendment rights would apparently include not just “universal background checks” and the like, but a complete ban on individual firearms ownership and drastic steps to confiscate firearms now in the hands of Americans. She has lauded the Australian government for its “common-sense” campaign to confiscate privately owned firearms through mandatory “buy-backs” coupled with criminal penalties for those who don’t turn in their guns — a scheme that would be blatantly unconstitutional under Heller. When asked during the second debate about the sort of person she would appoint to the Supreme Court, her response was completely outcome-oriented. She would appoint justices who share her policy goals while making no reference either to the Constitution or to the Founders’ belief that a free society is as dependent on what government shouldn’t do as on what it should be granted the power to do. A Clinton court that would do what Mrs. Clinton wants could be expected to do just what Messrs Trump and LaPierre warned about: abolition of the Second Amendment prohibition on government interference with the right of individuals to “keep and bear arms.” • David A. Keene is opinion editor at The Washington Times and the former president of the National Rifle Association. Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.

Instead, there’s just more surface – layer upon layer of it, like the pages of a glossy magazine, each one lacquered to a blinding shine. Refn isn’t setting out to satirise the fashion industry so much as colonise it, then deploy its substantial visual arsenal to his own nefarious ends. When Jesse arrives at her first professional shoot and the photographer ‘clears the set’ and asks her to undress – quadruply sinister, since we’re aware she’s just 16 years old - we brace for something sickening. But instead the photographer turns off the lights, brings out a pot of golden paint, and anoints Jesse with it before getting to work. She’s not exploited, she’s exalted. Fanning gets all this exactly right, pushing Jesse’s terror down into her wriggling fingers when she realises she’s alone and helpless, before somehow transforming into something bigger and more glamorous than herself when the shoot goes very right.

For this installment in the series, Kodachrome images from the Library of Congress collection are used that were taken by Russell Lee and Jack Delano. In pre-World War II years both worked for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) with a group of other very talented and noted photographers. The project documented existing conditions during the Great Depression and the results of relief efforts for disadvantaged farmers, and farm workers. Russell Lee was born and raised in Ottawa, Illinois. After finishing a college education his first job was as a chemical engineer. Next he became a painter and finally turned back to photography that he learned earlier to assist him with his works of art – he then mastered it before joining the FSA in 1936. Starting in 1947 Lee worked as a photographer in Austin, Texas and later taught photography at the University of Texas at Austin. Jack Delano was a native Russian born in the village of Voroshilovka in the Ukraine. He moved to the US with his family in 1923 and then studied photography and graphic arts for the next eight years. His first job was as a photographer with the Depression-era Federal Art Project, but he soon joined the FSA and finished his career of government work by joining the United States Office of War Information where he worked as a photographer between 1942 and 1946. As usual comment on anything you find interesting and add whatever information you can about the trucks and automobiles in the images. All photographs are courtesy of the Library of Congress. The lead photo (above) by Russell Lee was taken in Pie Town, New Mexico, late in 1940 of a gas station and repair shop. Two visible style gasoline pumps and an early 1930s Ford Truck are seen in this view. This image by Jack Delano is one of a series of well-known photos that documents both farmers and the public at the 1941 Vermont State Fair in Rutland. This elderly couple appears to be eating lunch behind their GM Sedan? Date and identify the blue sedan built by the Chrysler Corporation. This view by Jack Delano shows trucks waiting near a food processing facility in Caribou, Maine, the northern-most city in New England, during the fall of 1940. Note the low stake bed bodies used for hauling potatoes in barrels and crates. This 1941 scene by Russell Lee in Cascade, Idaho shows the center of the small rural City. A year later in 1942 the United States Bureau of Reclamation began a project to dam the northern fork of the Payette River and created the Cascade Reservoir that was finished in 1948. This photograph taken during 1940 in Colorado at harvest time by Russell Lee shows farm workers cars next to a stack of hay drying. In the image, we see a pair of 1933 or 1934 Ford Sedans, one clean and the other that is quite dirty. The two sedans on either side, we will let our readers identify. We are back in Pie Town, New Mexico again with Russell Lee at the fair held in the fall of 1940. This car is close to ten years old and looks as though it has led a rough farm life. The positioning of the top bows was changed, and the styling of the covering was modified, and a different rear window is framed in wood. It took some time to identify exactly what year(s) it was offered in, what nameplate(s) were used on it and what model it is, but we will let our readers who enjoy solving mysteries tells us what they think it is. The correct and complete answers will be posted on Monday. Another photo from Pie Town, New Mexico by Russell Lee taken in 1940 showing a scene on one of the unimproved roads there. This Model “A” Ford is one of the first Fordor Sedans built starting in mid-1928 and is a Model 60-A that is called a Leatherback. This body style built for Ford by the Briggs Manufacturing Co. featured a brown artificial leather roof covering with a pebble-grained surface finish. You can view the earlier parts of this new Kodachrome series here.

A man arrested on suspicion of drug charges and child endangerment said he is concerned with the actions of police who shot two dogs they described as “aggressive” while serving a drug-related search warrant at his home earlier this month in southwest Columbia.Police arrested Jonathan E. Whitworth, 25, of 1501 Kinloch Court on Feb. 11 on suspicion of possession of drug paraphernalia, possession of marijuana and second-degree child endangerment.A police SWAT team entered Whitworth’s residence around 8:30 p.m. suspecting a large amount of marijuana at the location, police spokeswoman Officer Jessie Haden said. SWAT members encountered a pit bull upon entry, held back and then fatally shot the dog, which officers said was acting in an uncontrollably aggressive manner.Whitworth was arrested, and his wife and 7-year-old son were present during the SWAT raid, Haden said. A second dog, which Whitworth’s attorney Jeff Hilbrenner described as a corgi, also was shot but was not killed.“The family is concerned with what happened,” Hilbrenner said. “We don’t feel like what happened in the home was appropriate. The priority right now for us is the misdemeanor charges.”Police discovered a grinder, a pipe and a small amount of marijuana, Haden said. Because the SWAT team acts on the most updated information available, the team wanted to enter the house before marijuana believed to be at the location could be distributed, she said.“If you let too much time go by, then the drugs are not there,” she said.Drug distributors traditionally have a history with firearms, which is why the SWAT team is used when executing such warrants, Haden said. If the SWAT team believed they could have executed the warrant successfully during the daytime when the wife and child were not present, they would have, she said.

Love on your mind? Why not recite a rich, authentic opera from below your loved ones ivy-painted balcony. Wait, you can’t speak Italian? You haven’t downloaded Influent? You’re not much of a singer? For shame! For those of you not in the loop, Influent is a vocabulary-honing sandbox adventure from Three Flip Studios. The game, which boasts “500 unique audio pronunciations” per language, is an incredible study tool for both beginners and those looking to sharpen an existing skill. By presenting its lessons within 3D environments, Influent dodges the monotony frequently associated with study. Nearly every object in the game acts as a virtual flashcard, so learning becomes second nature to clicking (as well as exploring, smiling and laughing) as your brain absorbs information in the coolest way possible: through a video game. The latest language pack focuses on Italian, tongue of the romantics (and mobsters). You’ll finally be able to pen an impressive (and creepily obsessive) letter to your favorite telenovela actress, or break strikes for your borgata’s cosca. If you’ve already purchased Influent, the DLC can be nabbed for $4.99. Those without the base game can pick it up — plus any one of the 12 available languages — for $9.99. While learning and fun rarely meld harmoniously, Influent is the proof of possibility. It’s engrossing, enjoyable and, most importantly, effective. Read our review for more information.

The "lost 116 pages" were the original manuscript pages of what Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, said was the translation of the Book of Lehi,[1] the first portion of the golden plates revealed to him by an angel in 1827. These pages, which had not been copied, were lost by Smith's scribe, Martin Harris, during the summer of 1828 and are presumed to have been destroyed. Smith completed the Book of Mormon without retranslating the Book of Lehi, replacing it with what he said was an abridgment taken from the Plates of Nephi.[2] Background [ edit ] Joseph Smith said that on September 22, 1827, he had recovered a set of buried golden plates in a prominent hill near his parents' farm in Manchester, New York. Martin Harris, a respectable but superstitious[3] farmer from nearby Palmyra, became an early believer and gave Smith $50 to finance the translation of the plates.[4] Lucy Harris, Martin's wife, also donated some of her own money and offered to give more, even though Smith denied her request to see the plates and told her that "in relation to assistance, I always prefer dealing with men rather than their wives."[5] (citation and bibliography are in conflict) Smith and his wife, Emma, moved to her hometown of Harmony, Pennsylvania, in late October 1827, where he began transcribing the writing on the plates.[6] When Harris left Palmyra to visit Smith without taking his wife along, she became suspicious that Smith intended to defraud her and her husband.[7] When Harris returned, Lucy refused to share his bed, and she had a suitor of her daughter surreptitiously copy the characters on the Anthon transcript that Smith had given to Harris.[8] Lucy then accompanied her husband back to Harmony in April 1828, when Martin agreed to serve as Smith's scribe.[9] Before returning home after two weeks, Lucy searched the Smith house and grounds for the plates but was unable to locate them. Smith said he did not need their physical presence to create the transcription[10] and that they were hidden in a nearby woods.[11] Harris as Smith's scribe [ edit ] From April to June 1828, Harris acted as Smith's scribe as Smith dictated the manuscript using the Urim and Thummim and seer stones.[12] By the middle of June, Smith had dictated about 116 manuscript pages of text.[13] Harris continued to have doubts about the authenticity of the manuscript,[14] and he "could not forget his wife's skepticism or the hostile queries of Palmyra's tavern crowd." Smith's mother, Lucy, "said that Harris asked Joseph for a look at the plates, for 'a further witness of their actual existence and that he might be better able to give a reason for the hope that was within him.' When that request was denied, he asked about the manuscript. Could he at least take it home to reassure his wife?"[15] After denying his request twice, Smith, with a great deal of uneasiness, said that the Lord had given permission, and he allowed Harris to take the manuscript pages back to Palmyra on condition that he show them to only five named family members. He even made Harris bind himself in a solemn oath.[16] The manuscript disappears [ edit ] Martin Harris at age 87, more than forty years after he lost the manuscript. When Harris returned home, he showed the manuscript to his wife, who allowed him to lock them in her bureau. Harris then showed the pages not only to the named relatives but "to any friend who came along."[17] On one occasion Harris picked the lock of the bureau and damaged it, irritating his wife.[18] The manuscript then disappeared.[19] Shortly after Harris left Harmony, Smith's wife gave birth to Smith's firstborn son, who was "very much deformed" and died less than a day after delivery.[20] Emma Smith nearly died herself, and Smith tended her for two weeks. As she slowly gained strength, Smith left her in the care of her mother and went back to Palmyra in search of Harris and the manuscript.[21] The following day Harris was dragged into the Smith family home in distress and without the pages. Smith urged Harris to search his house again, but Harris told him he had already ripped open beds and pillows. Smith moaned, "Oh, my God! ... All is lost! all is lost! What shall I do? I have sinned—it is I who tempted the wrath of God".[22] After returning to Harmony without Harris, Smith dictated to Emma his first written revelation,[23] which both rebuked Smith and denounced Harris as "a wicked man."[24] Nevertheless, the revelation assured Smith that if he was penitent, the interpreters would be returned to him during his annual visit with Moroni on September 22, 1828, and he would regain his ability to translate.[25] Resumed transcription and the witnesses [ edit ] Between the loss of the pages during the summer of 1828 and the rapid completion of the Book of Mormon in the spring of 1829, there was a period of quiescence as if Smith were waiting "for help or direction."[26] In April 1829, Smith was joined by Oliver Cowdery, a fellow Vermonter and a distant relation who replaced Harris as scribe.[27] The pace of the transcription increased so dramatically that, within two months, nearly the entire remainder of the manuscript of the Book of Mormon was completed.[28] According to Smith, he did not retranslate the material that Harris had lost because he said that if he did, evil men would alter the manuscript in an effort to discredit him. Smith said that instead, he had been divinely ordered to replace the lost material with Nephi's account of the same events.[29] (Nevertheless, "evil men" might also have altered the lost manuscript to contradict the new account as well,[30] as is evidenced by Mark Hofmann's supposed desire to do so.)[31] When Smith reached the end of the book, he was told that God had foreseen the loss of the early manuscript and had prepared the same history in an abridged format that emphasized religious history, the Small Plates of Nephi.[32] Smith transcribed this portion, and it appears as the first part of the book. When published in 1830, the Book of Mormon contained a statement about the lost 116 pages, as well as the Testimony of Three Witnesses and the Testimony of Eight Witnesses, who claimed to have seen and handled the golden plates. The loss of the manuscript provided opponents of Mormonism, such as the 19th-century clergyman M. T. Lamb, with additional reasons to dismiss the religion as a fraud.[33] Fawn Brodie has written that Smith "realized that it was impossible for him to reproduce the story exactly, and that to redictate it would be to invite devastating comparisons. Harris's wife taunted him: 'If this be a divine communication, the same being who revealed it to you can easily replace it.'"[34] Ex-Mormons Jerald and Sandra Tanner argued that the lost manuscript suggested that Smith was not a misguided individual who believed in his own creative imagination but was at least minimally aware of his own deception.[35] According to Jeffrey R. Holland, an apostle in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), "it was not tit for tat, this for that—you give me 116 pages of manuscript and I'll give you 142 pages of printed text. Not so. We got back more than we lost. And it was known from the beginning that it would be so."[36] Martin Harris was permitted by Smith to be one of the Three Witnesses. He mortgaged his farm for $3000 as security in the event that the Book of Mormon did not sell, and when in fact, it did not, he lost both his farm and his wife.[37] He later disavowed Joseph Smith, left the church, joined several different varieties of early Mormon-related congregations, then at 87 joined the LDS Church and recanted what he'd earlier said about Smith. He never disavowed the gold plates, however. On his death bed, Harris said: "The Book of Mormon is no fake. I know what I know. I have seen what I have seen and I have heard what I have heard. I have seen the gold plates from which the Book of Mormon is written. An angel appeared to me and others and testified to the truthfulness of the record, and had I been willing to have perjured myself and sworn falsely to the testimony I now bear I could have been a rich man, but I could not have testified other than I have done and am now doing for these things are true."[38] See also [ edit ] Notes [ edit ] References [ edit ]

Nokia CEO is a coward to not give the exact count of Lumia sales in his Q4 results, the launch quarter for Lumia. So lets do some math based on the available info, to count exactly how many it was. (Note an update added on April 11 - an update at the end relating to Q1 Nokia profit warning and published Q1 smartphone numbers) When Microsoft launched Windows Phone a year ago, Microsoft proudly told the world that they shipped 2 million Windows Phone smartphones by HTC, Samsung and others. They soon were spooked, however, when the sales dwindled and dried up and stopped giving the sales breakdown. By the Spring, Microsoft insisted all Windows Mobile smartphones be counted together with Windows Phone - even as these two platforms are incompatible. And still the sales of 'the third ecosystem' kept falling, down to about 500,000 units by Q3. And early numbers from Q4 from Microsoft's best market, the USA, reveal that even more than a year after its launch, Windows Phone sales are still severely lagging its older and obsolete cousin, achieving only 1.4% or about 520,000 units. Windows Mobile meanwhile refuses to die, and in the USA achieved 2.4% market share of new sales according to Nielsen or about 890,000 unit sales. Thus if you remember seeing a 'Microsoft' market share in smartphones somewhere near 2% for Q3, that includes the better-selling Windows Mobile, and the newer and supposedly better so-called 'third ecosystem; Windows Phone has far less than 1% market share globally. So with that context, the analysts' consensus estimate for Lumia launch quarter sales was 1.3 million units. We know that didn't happen. Nokia would have proudly celebrated if it had at least matched the expectation, or exceeded it. I explained on this blog why the real comparison target should have been 6.4 million for the first quarter of Lumia sales, and the minimum barely acceptable level was 4 million. But thats neither here nor there. Lets now see what we know, to try to get to the bottom of what Nokia is hiding. Nokia told us in the Q4 results published January 26, 2012, that Lumia sales 'to date' had passed 1 million. We know its well below 1.3 million. And we know that it includes January sales with nearly a full month of sales of Lumia 710 in the five expansion markets (Hong Kong, India, Russia, Singapore and Taiwan) who only got the Lumia a few days before Christmas in mid December. Also the T-Mobile USA Lumia 710 was never sold in December. For these cheaper Lumia 710 unit sales, the vast majority of their sales will have come after Q4. The early Lumia markets of Europe that got the Lumia 800 (Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain and the UK) received their Lumias from November. As Christmas sales is a peak period, its fair to assume most Lumia sales in these markets did happen in Q4, not Q1. Lets measure the maximum potential market for the Lumia, based on market measurements. Kantar Worldpanel kindly gave us a summary statement about Lumia sales in Q4, saying that in every market that they follow, which includes most of the big European markets where Lumia had launched, Kantar found that Lumia did not exceed 2% in any single country. Kantar reported from September 2011 market shares (and looking also at September 2010) that in September 2011, in the five biggest European markets, Nokia's market share in smartphones was 46.7% (as calculated on the basis of a weighted average per capita). So almost half of European consumers today will come to a store selling mobile phone handsets, with an existing Nokia smartphone in their pocket and would expect to replace it with the newest Nokia model. Remember that Nokia did not have a broad portfolio of new rival smartphones to offer as a rival to the Lumia in these countries. And when 47% of customers walk in asking for the newest Nokia, then try the Lumia, and only (less than) 2% walk out with one - it means Nokia has managed to disappoint 94% of its existing customer base! The Lumia smartphones are so undesirable that more than nine out of ten currently Nokia-owning consumers will try it but reject it. (I said this would happen, especially in Europe, especially with existing Nokia users, but even I could not imagine it would be this bad). That is total comprehensive market failure - even where Microsoft will toss in a free Xbox gaming console to try to entice sales. No wonder Apple's iPhone and Samsung's Galaxy have had a stellar quarter. These numbers are consistent with Nokia Q4 results (which do not break down the smartphone sales per region - I will do a calculation estimating that mix later on this blog). The overall Nokia handset sales declined 8% from the same quarter a year ago. But in Europe the handset sales (smartphones and dumbphones) declined 24%. Nokia in Europe is suffering far more than globally. And the most revealing number comes from handset revenues by region - which fell by 38%. So where Nokia was gaining revenues by sales of its premium smartphones like the Lumia and the N9, that was spectacularly not happening in Europe in Q4. LUMIA ESTIMATE Q4 So lets take the European market. Kantar said no more than 2% in any market they measured. Lets forget about 'less than' and use the highest number, lets say every European market achieved 2% Lumia sales. You can't accuse me of trying to suppress the 'success' haha.. We have a convenient point in the global smartphone market to help us with this estimate. In Q3 China passed the USA as the single biggest smartphone country by volume. Europe has sold slightly more than the USA. When we add Canada to the USA to make a 'North America' market, we get actually four almost exactly even sized markets for smartphones - Europe, North America, China, and Rest of World. The total global market for smartphones for Q4 was about 148 million units, so each of these four markets has an individual market size of about 37 million smartphones. Lets do some math! The 7 big European countries where Lumia 800 had launched in Q4 account for 63% of the subscribers. When we take 63% of the European 37 million market, we get 23.3 million for the countries where Lumia launched. Take 2% of that and we have 466,000 Lumia smartphone sales. Then the expansion countries where Lumia 710 launched in mid December are Hong Kong, India, Russia, Singapore and Taiwan. These countries account for 26% of the mobile phone subscribers of the 'Rest of World' market so 26% of that 37 million gives us 192,000 smartphones. Except that Lumia had nearly two months of sales time in the first European markets, and only two weeks for these expansion countries, and only days before Christmas, it is definite that if Nokia Lumia can achieve 2% market success across those first 7 countries in about 2 months, it cannot even achieve half of that in only two weeks. But again, lets be generous to Nokia, and lets say that in these next five countries, Lumia achieved half the performance it did in the longer time in the first countries. So we cut the 192,000 in half, and thus Nokia sold 96,000 Lumia smartphones in the next five countries. We have a total Lumia sales estimate for Q4 of 2011, in 12 countries of Europe and Asia of 466,000 + 92,000 = 558,000 units. Then to add the sales to the stores (there will always be some units in inventory not yet sold) we can call it roughly 600,000 total sales of Lumia during Q4, when measured as Nokia sales. No wonder Elop didn't want to mention the number. And yes, obviously, the Lumia sales account for 0.4% (not four percent, but zero point four percent) of all smartphones sold in Q4. Note we have to add other Windows Phone sales to that number and we'll have about 1% total global market share for Windows Phone the so-called third ecosystem haha.. LUMIA SALES EARLY PROJECTION Q1 And then we can see that if Nokia did about 1.1 million Lumia sales 'to date' - it would mean so far 500,000 more sales in January. Multiply that by 3 to get a full quarter, and we have 1,5 million sales. Add more growth or some more countries and in rough terms, expect Q2 sales for Lumia 800 and 710 to sell approx 2 million units in Q1. Pretty pathetic actually (especially if you are still holding your breath, that Nokia somehow matches that Morgan Stanley projection of 37 million Lumia sales this year haha). HOW COMPARES TO N9 So Nokia did 600,000 Lumia sales in the most important new smartphone launch in Nokia history. The launch where all factors were totally in the control of the new CEO, without any limitations. He could decide what form factor the new phones would have, what countries to launch in, WHEN to launch the phones, when to ANNOUNCE the phones, when to demo the prototypes, who to receive samples to try them, etc. He had the biggest Nokia launch promotion budget ever, and that was then added to by literally several hundred million dollars of Microsoft marketing money to push the launch - inlcuding those famous free Xbox gaming consoles that you would receive if you bought Lumia 800s with some carriers/operators. The Lumia first launch countries were not only markets where Nokia was exceptionally strong (having like I said, 47% market share in the installed base ie return customers) - they also were some of the wealthiest nations not just in Europe (UK, Germany etc) but in Asia (Singapore, Hong Kong etc). And they achieved 600,000. How did this compare to Nokia's N9, where Nokia only had one handset to sell (vs 2 with Lumia). Where Nokia had almost no meaningful marketing support, and selling in many countries of very modest income levels like in Europe Romania, Turkey, Hungary, Slovakia etc - and in the rest of the world such less wealthy nations as Russia, Brazil, Mexico, Vietnam, Bangladesh and Indonesia. Luckily I didn't have to do the math for this, the nice people at All About Symbian had tracked the numbers (read through the comments) and calculated the limits, finding N9 sales to be between the level of 1.5 million and 2.0 million units in Q4. Wow! Nokia specifically excluded all of its richest and biggest traditional markets where it tried to sell the Lumia, and these countries achieved - lets call it the average, 1.75 million unit sales of the N9 in Q4. So the one N9 outsold both Lumia handsets by almost exactly 3 to 1. And the average price of the two Lumia handsets is far less than the price of the N9. Obviously MeeGo on one handset alone, with no Nokia support, is outselling all Windows Phone smartphones by Samsung, HTC and Nokia, with the massive Microsoft marketing effort, globally, by about 2 to 1. MeeGo does this in its first quarter when it was not sold for the full quarter. This compared to Windows Phone that is well into its second year of sales. What is wrong with this picture? Did I just see the 'Third Ecosystem' fall from 7th to 8th? Behind Android, Symbian, iOS, Blackberry, bada, Windows Mobile, and now even MeeGo? Why isn't Elop and Ballmer calling it what it is. Windows Phone is the 8th bestselling ecosystem, ie it will never succeed. But lets go back to MeeGo. So you have cheaper smartphones, sold in the most affluent markets, with the biggest marketing support by Nokia ever, and with massive multi-hundred-million dollar marketing budget by Microsoft. And you get 600,000 unit sales for Lumia. Then you have the more expensive smartphone, sold in far poorer markets, with minimal Nokia support and visibility, and no partners to toss in dollars, and you sell 3 times more? What is wrong with this picture? WHY IS ELOP NOT FLOODING THE PLANET WITH MEEGO The total footprint of the countries where the N9 now sells, covers a smartphone market in Q4 of 59 million units of smartphones sold. And Nokia did 1.75 million sales in it. If Elop had bothered to launch the N9 in all markets, rather than 1.75 million unit sales, he would have achieved 4.4 million unit sales just using this one handset. But there is a second MeeGo smartphone also manufactured today, that Elop simply refuses to sell. Understand, Nokia currently has a second MeeGo superphone, that it has not just designed and tested and put into production. All the big costs are now done. And Nokia refuses to sell this second MeeGo device to any markets! It is the N950, the sister phone to the N9, the QWERTY variant of the N9, much like how the E7 was the sister to the N8 last year. The N950 would sell well in all markets. If we assume it only sold 50% of the level that the N9 is selling now, Nokia would have MeeGo sales of 6.6 million smartphones globally. Note, I set my target 6.4 million before we had this data. And if only Nokia release the N9 globally, rather than bizarre distant lands like Kazakhstan and New Zealand - and offered the sister phone N950 - even before any real strong Nokia support, the math suggests Nokia would have easily cleared the target I said what Nokia should be able to do today, when launching a new smartphone platform and device. Why Elop only managed 600,000 in Q4 - yes, only one TENTH of what any reasonable expectation would have been - says less about how bad Elop is as a manager, and more about how much the carriers and retail channel hate now Elop, Nokia as it currently is seen, and especially Microsoft, and Windows Phone. But yes, 6.6 million unit sales is what Nokia had in its hand for Q4 if any sane manager had been in charge. This is BEFORE we consider Elop's personal support of MeeGo and any reasonable marketing support by Nokia, which would boost those sales considerably! Remember, the N9 already is being called superior to the iPhone 4S by some comparisons (the Lumia 800 and even Lumia 900 comes nowhere close to such comparisons). Remember the German newsmagazine Der Stern endorsement that was so glowing, they urged Germans to drive to Switzerland to buy an N9 rather than buying a Lumia 800 today. HOW MUCH MONEY The profit margin for the Nokia smartphone unit a year ago, when it was selling the N8, was 11%. As this was the flagship phone, a very conservative estimate is that the profit margin for the N8 was twice that, at 22% (probably far bigger at the time). If we use a 400 Euro price for the N9 and N950, and we assign 22% profit margin - provocativcely now - the total revenues that Elop is now abandoning out of not selling his MeeGo smartphones is ... 6.6M units minus 1.75M units = 4.85M units of abandoned sales to loyal Nokia customers who are yearning for a new Nokia flagship smartphone they can love. How much is that? 4.85 million MeeGo sales (N9 and N950) at 400 Euros per handset = 1.9 Billion Euros of revenues. Rather than Nokia reporting a 1.6 Billion Euro decline in sales revenues in Q4, with 2.7 Billion total revenues in the unit, Nokia's CEO could have proudly reported an INCREASE of 300 million Euros above the revenues a year ago in smartphones and total revenues now of 4.6 Billion Euros. And profits? The extra 4.85 million MeeGo sales that Nokia had in its palm, but refused to take, would have generated at only 22% profit margin, additional profits to the smartphone unit of .. 426 million Euros !! So the smartphone unit, rather than reporting a loss of 190 million Euros, would have instead reported a profit of 236 million Euros ! That not only would have been the biggest profit in the smartphone unit of any of the Nokia quarters in 2011, it would have even pulled the Nokia smartphone unit into the profit column for the full year 2011 !!!! What is wrong with Stephen Elop? How incompetent is he, to take a highly desirable product he has, and refuse to sell it broadly, now when it still is reasonably hot and in demand. This opportunity will vanish in only some months. He is a criminal for not selling the MeeGo handsets broadly now. He is acting against the best interests of Nokia (out of some mis-placed loyalty to Microsoft). Elop must be fired, now! PS - I have now added the regional split calculation and some stunning findings about Lumia and N9 customer acceptance. UPDATE APRIL 11 For anyone still reading this blog, Nokia just issued its profit warning today and I have commented on it and crunched some numbers. The Q1 Lumia sales were disasterous too, at only 2 million - which means that as China had its New Year's gift-giving sales and the iPhone 4S had severe launch problems (some shops shut for several days fearing riots) - the N9 may have outsold all Lumia also in Q1. Read my view of the Nokia Profit Warning and why things are even worse.

A senior Republican lawmaker on Friday agreed that a special prosecutor should investigate Russia's alleged interference with the 2016 presidential election. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) became one of the few Republican representatives to state publicly the need for an independent investigation into Russia's reported election meddling. This comes as Democrats have increasingly pushed for an investigation into President Trump's associates' ties to Russia. In an appearance on HBO's “Real Time with Bill Maher,” Issa, a senior member of the House Judiciary Committee, first told the progressive show host that House and Senate intelligence committees would look into Russia's activities “within the special areas they oversee.” That was not sufficient for Maher, who pressed Issa — formerly the head of the House Oversight Committee — on whether he would have “let that slide” had similar suspicions arose involving the Democrats. Maher has been a vocal critic of Trump. Shortly after the election, a CIA assessment concluded that hackers with connections to the Russian government targeted the Democratic National Committee and leaked thousands of emails to WikiLeaks in an effort to sway the outcome in Trump's favor. United States intelligence agencies have said they agree with the assessment, and a broad investigation is underway. National Security reporter Greg Miller explains why the Trump administration is enlisting the help of intelligence officials and Members of Congress to counter Russia stories. (Jorge Ribas,Ashleigh Joplin/The Washington Post) Russia has denied the accusations, and Trump — who has a history of praising Russian President Vladimir Putin — has vehemently denounced the findings and continued to blast the intelligence community. “Let's go back to 2012,” Maher asked Issa on the show Friday. “Say the Russians hacked only Mitt Romney and there was a lot of contact between the Obama administration and Russia. You'd have let that slide?” “No,” Issa replied. “So you're not gonna let this slide?” Maher asked. “No,” Issa said. [It’s bigger than Flynn. New Russia revelations widen Trump’s credibility gap.] Issa then replied that lawmakers would ask the House and Senate intelligence committees investigate. Maher protested, saying there needed to be a special prosecutor — and that now-Attorney General Jeff Sessions should recuse himself “the same way former Attorney General Loretta Lynch recused herself” from an investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails. On Friday, The Washington Post reported that the Trump administration tried to enlist intelligence officials to counter news stories about Russia's ties with Trump's associates. Trump's national security adviser, Michael Flynn, resigned earlier this month over revelations about his potentially illegal contacts with the Russian ambassador to the United States and misleading senior officials. Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), echoing other Democrats, has said that “the appearance of bias is unavoidable” if Sessions does not recuse himself in an independent investigation. Sessions indicated during the confirmation process that he would not recuse himself during any investigations involving Trump. “If merely being a supporter of the President’s during the campaign warranted recusal from involvement in any matter involving [Trump], then most typical presidential appointees would be unable to conduct their duties,” Sessions told Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) in written responses to the Senate Judiciary Committee, according to Politico. On Friday, however, Issa seemed to agree with Maher that Sessions should not be involved in an investigation. “You're right, you cannot have somebody, a friend of mine, Jeff Sessions, who was on the campaign and who was an appointee,” he said. “You're going to need to use the special prosecutor's statute and office.” [A turf war breaks out in the Senate: Who will investigate Russia’s connections to the Trump campaign?] Issa added that it would also be inappropriate for Sessions to pass the investigation on to the deputy attorney general. He then explained, in a lengthy tangent, that Russia needed to be investigated “because they are bad people.” “Here's the reason we're going to have to do it, Bill. There may or may not be fault, but the American people who are beginning to understand that Putin murders his enemies — sometimes right in front of the Kremlin, and then suddenly the cameras don't work there — he's murdered people and taken down [sic] using cyberwarfare in Georgia and Ukraine. This is a bad guy who murders people, who runs a gas station with an economy the size of Italy but is screwing up things all over the world that we've been doing — 'working with.' Now, we have to work with them. We don't have to trust them. And we need to investigate their activities and we need to do it because they are bad people.” Issa is serving his ninth term in Congress but is likely to face a grueling midterm election in 2018. After a lengthy reelection campaign last year, Issa narrowly defeated Democrat Doug Applegate in November to hold onto his seat in California's 49th Congressional District. [GOP senator says she’s open to demanding Trump’s tax returns as part of Russia probe] Most of Issa's appearance on Maher's show Friday focused on efforts to overhaul the health-care system. Issa has long been a vocal advocate of repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act and last week released a draft bill titled the “Access to Insurance for All Americans Act.” On Tuesday, Issa was accused of skipping out on his constituents when he did not attend, as expected, an “emergency town hall” on health care in the San Diego area. Video from the event showed the crowd chanting “Where is Darrell?” and “Where is Issa?” repeatedly. In response, tweets with the hashtag #WhereIsDarrell began appearing. Another video from the event showed Issa's face attached to a large cardboard cutout of Waldo, the purposely hard-to-spot cartoon character that was the star of a children's book series. We know where the constituents of CD49 are tonight, but #WhereIsDarrell? If you see him, please tell him we'd like to talk.#ResistRecess pic.twitter.com/QDnRlXq1C3 — Indivisible SanDiego (@SDIndivisible) February 22, 2017 When Maher brought up the lawmaker's absence from the town hall, Issa defended himself by saying that he had “over 14 separate events open to the public in the last two weeks” and that he had spoken to several hundred people who showed up outside his office to protest recently. “The reality is is there are not enough town-hall meetings,” Issa told Maher. “We've gone to tele-town hall.” Read more: Trump administration sought to enlist intelligence officials, key lawmakers to counter Russia stories Flynn episode ‘darkens the cloud’ of Russia that hangs over Trump administration Republican lawmaker who won’t hold a town hall invokes Gabby Giffords shooting. She responds: ‘Have some courage.’